Ah yes, that is true. However Julia is tackling a harder problem in that the speed lag is presumably due to optimizing for custom element and table types.
"for custom element and table types" that is highly likely to be true, but unless an equally fast Julia program exists I remained scientifically skeptical. But my prior believe is that Julia can be as fast.
DataFrames.jl doesn't parameterize on its types and tries to rely on function barriers to be fast enough. That's what gives it the speed issue. IMO this isn't the best idea. It's not difficult to write a data table that's easier to optimize than that, but you would have to give up some of the flexibility.
