> For example, a trivial hello world program in Julia runs ~27x slower than Python’s version and ~187x slower than the one in C.

I don't think it makes any sense to speak of "__x slower" for hello-world. Clearly, this is just a benchmark of startup time, so you only pay it once per program. It should be reported as "__ms slower".

Julia startup (according to this post) takes 371ms. That's 357ms slower than Python, and 369ms slower than C. Faster is always better, but this doesn't seem so bad to me.

For comparison, on my old workstation here, starting a Swift repl takes 2724ms, and starting a Clojure repl takes 4792ms.

Sure... and it means that Swift and Clojure are just as useless as Julia for numerous use cases where start-up times matter, like piping CLI commands together, in Julia's case you're looking at pathetic 3 execs per second.

Moreover, even in some server-side applications it's super neat to have the luxury to spawn a new process to service certain requests, not having to worry about memory leaks. It's a perfect "API" which allows multiple languages to interact together.

It always bothered me when people dismiss the start-up time by adding "just" in front of it. We're not talking about web frameworks, these are _general purpose_ programming languages, and horrendous start-up time automatically disqualifies them from being general purpose and places them into a niche category, in my humble opinion.

If you want to build CLIs without the JIT overhead, you can compile your Julia code: https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl