While I hope they'll keep the pace of improving the JIT lag (perhaps even adding a fast optional interpreter or AoT compilation of parts of code), the benchmark

While I hope they'll keep the pace of improving the JIT lag (perhaps even adding a fast optional interpreter or AoT compilation of parts of code), the benchmarks are fine considering compilation is a one time paid ticket, while runtime is paid by usage. It's not just high compute, if I set up a website in Julia on a docker after the "cold start" (which can be handled before using packagecompiler if I don't want any client to feel the slow JIT compilation, as I obviously should) then it should run at the benchmarked runtime speed even if each request is very short (as the compilation price was paid already). That applies to most services in general, and even during development Julia programmers eventually learn not to cold start all the times (keeping the session open until you stop programming, so you again only pay the cost once). Of course, any short task that must cold start like a bash script isn't convenient at all (and packagecompiler will generate a fat binary that runs fast, but it's still inconveniently fat if it's for something simple). And Julia's first impression is really important, which the "time to first plot" seems to affect the most (as you need to go deeper on the language to adapt to it's unusual workflow), so I agree that it's a UX priority.