In addition to the excellent answer by the author below, I'd like to say that Julia can get within spitting distance (or even sometimes exceed) C++ speeds (an

In addition to the excellent answer by the author below, I'd like to say that Julia can get within spitting distance (or even sometimes exceed) C++ speeds (and even BLAS). So if a comparable amount of work went into optimizing specific paths through generic code (or even the generic code itself), it could be as fast. Also, one can write CUDA kernels in pure Julia.