Have you used Julia recently? Vectorised operations are just as fast relative to hand written loops as c and FORTRAN, you just need to appropriately annotate @inbounds and @simd. Sure that’s more work, but removing safety checks should be explicit.
My main gripe with the julia interpreter was that it was ridiculously slow to startup (I was using it as a "calculator" from within a shell loop: each iteration spawned a julia to perform a simple matrix computation). Does this performance has improved recently?
By the way, what do you mean by "removing safety checks should be explicit" ? This sounds like a problem that the language should be able to deal with itself without bothering the programer (e.g. if the bounds of the loop are variables of known value, it can be checked beforehand, so the bounds checks can be safely omitted).
AFAIK it was designed for long running processes, not for quick start up time. On the other hand, I don't find it that slow for experimentation on the REPL.
