Looks pretty nice. Unfortunately, I never run into this issue because I only get to write research code.

The Julia language was designed to target the two language problem and at least from these benchmarks it looks pretty competitive [1]. I imagine over time, pythran may fix some limitations and beat Julia in most benchmarks.

[1] https://github.com/fluiddyn/BenchmarksPythonJuliaAndCo/tree/...

Note that the blog post is also about deployment, not just about performance. Does Julia support statically compiled executables without dependencies or GC?

Unfortunately, not really. There is some community work in that regard [1], but it doesn't seem to get as much attention as one would like. Some people have gotten it to work, but official support (guaranteeing maintenance and decent documentation) for static compilation and easy deployment would make a huge difference.

[1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl