I would not be surprised. I did post it to HN at the time, and received some feedback on how I should better optimise (which I mention at the bottom of the post).

The exercise for me was to see how I fast I could get the julia code with my background, I am quite honest about the fact that I have less experience in julia, however for me the whole reason to look for something else then cython is that it takes so much background knowledge to get the ultimate speed, if I have to do the same for julia I don't really gain anything. I would argue the amount of optimisations in the julia code are already more than what I had to do in pythran.