Fortran is going to make a big comeback. I can feel it.
One of the major reasons why many researchers never cared for OpenCL.
It is indeed one of the few existing languages appropriate for generic experimentation in numeric programming.
For example, computing the product of two matrices in C or Fortran is exactly as fast by writing three nested loops or by calling a library function. In python, julia, octave, etc, the difference is abysmal. This is a very sad state of affairs, that forces a mindset where you are allowed a limited toolset of fast operations and the rest are either slow or cumbersome. If you want to compute a variant of the matrix product using a slightly different formula, in Fortran it is trivial change, you just write the new formula inside the loop. But in python or julia you are stuck with either an unusably slow code or you have to write it in another language entirely.
"Vectorized" operations are cool, elegant, and beautiful. But they should not be the only tool available. As differential geometers often resort to coordinates to express their tensor operations, so should programmers be able to.
My main gripe with the julia interpreter was that it was ridiculously slow to startup (I was using it as a "calculator" from within a shell loop: each iteration spawned a julia to perform a simple matrix computation). Does this performance has improved recently?
By the way, what do you mean by "removing safety checks should be explicit" ? This sounds like a problem that the language should be able to deal with itself without bothering the programer (e.g. if the bounds of the loop are variables of known value, it can be checked beforehand, so the bounds checks can be safely omitted).
https://www.slideshare.net/MaurizioTomasi/towards-new-soluti...
Sure, I am not calculating the product of two matrices, but something else. In that case, I proved that Julia's performance is entirely on par with vectorized C++. I am indulged to believe that somebody might produce similar results for the test you are proposing (matrix product).
https://bitbucket.org/Maurizio_Tomasi/adass2018-julia/src/ma...
(and no, the download button does not work for me)