Dear all, I thought you might find this paper interesting: http://economics.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/comparison_languages.pdf
It takes a standard model from macro economics and computes it's solution with an identical algorithm in several languages. Julia is roughly 2.6 times slower than the best C++ executable. I was bit puzzled by the result, since in the benchmarks on http://julialang.org/, the slowest test is 1.66 times C. I realize that those benchmarks can't cover all possible situations. That said, I couldn't really find anything unusual in the Julia code, did some profiling and removed type inference, but still that's as fast as I got it. That's not to say that I'm disappointed, I still think this is great. Did I miss something obvious here or is there something specific to this algorithm? The codes are on github at https://github.com/jesusfv/Comparison-Programming-Languages-Economics