I haven't used Julia for anything yet, but I like that it not only optimizes explicit for-loops, but it also fuses code using vectorized-syntax even for user-defined functions and types. Compared to Matlab/Octave, Python, and R where loops are very (very)* slow and vectorized code is only fast for certain operations and library functions, it is appealing.

Julia also has annotations that can be use to explicitly tell the compiler to turn off bounds checking and emit SIMD instructions for loops.

• The Numba package brings JIT capability to CPython (and so numpy), and probably compares most favorably to Julia than the other languages. Octave also has an experimental JIT compiler (seems like a lot of overhead going from interpreter to machine code), as do recent versions of Matlab (since R2015b). R since 2.14.0 includes the 'compiler' package, a bytecode interpreter and JIT (which compiles to bytecode, not machine code), which probably helps for long-running loops.