Note that one of the benchmarks take 5 ms in c -- if that's all you're trying to compute, why care about speed at all? And of course JIT will be a huge penalty

Note that one of the benchmarks take 5 ms in c -- if that's all you're trying to compute, why care about speed at all? And of course JIT will be a huge penalty on that time scale. There are a bunch of benchmarks on the front page of http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/ that show only a small penalty for using julia over c.