Beyond that, wrapping C code from Julia is neither nicer nor worse than from CL. Wrapping C code is basically done everywhere except for a few outlier languages (Go comes to mind. It IS possible, but it means using cgo, which is its own world).
I liked Julia well enough, but the compile times were slow enough to be painful for me. All the best though to Julia :)
Agreed, I only included this because the author mentioned it explicitly as a requirement. From a "allows plugging into some other, large-community imperative language, like Clojure does with Java" perspective - in terms of library access - the combination of having well-polished interfaces to both C and Python is pretty powerful though.
> the compile times were slow enough to be painful for me
I think this, and the developer experience in general (eg. linting, IDE support, etc.), has been the biggest reason the excitement for Julia dampened over time, despite it being a wonderful language in theory. It's been getting better, from "painful" to just "somewhat annoying" for me, but not quickly enough to turn it around (IMHO).