Okay. This post:

http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/2013/12/22/the-relati...

had worried me a couple of years ago. JMW shows that vectorized was much slower also in Julia (though still both faster than R - but that's not difficult).

Glad to see Julia is very fast in both cases, though it's still somewhat perplexing the extent to which vectorized code is necessarily slower. I'm thinking that the future of GPU enabled languages will mean vectorized code will be faster, so I prefer languages with a bias towards vectorisation.