Julia startup time is 0.5 seconds on a very weak laptop. That's comparable to the JVM, which is nevertheless fairly popular. You may not want to write command line tools in Julia, but there's not much else that's a serious problem since process startup time is rarely that big of a performance issue.

Disregarding JIT time, Julia is as fast as compiled languages – we benchmark against C and Fortran and don't grade on a curve. This is not an aspiration, it's a well-established performance characteristic in both benchmarks [1] and real-world applications [2].

Regarding JIT time, it's important to understand that this is a fixed cost – for any computation that takes long enough to matter, the time taken by JIT will be a negligible fraction of the time. The reason to exclude JIT time when benchmarking is because most benchmarks don't take much time – tens of milliseconds, compared to which JIT is significant. But we don't actually care about the speed of things that only take tens of milliseconds – we're using benchmarks to extrapolate to things that take much longer, which is why you exclude JIT.

[1] http://julialang.org/benchmarks/

[2] http://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/