Very cool. We had a similar experience when implementing the Simplex method for linear optimization, except we evaluated PyPy versus Julia instead of Cython. Its similar in that it benchmarks "just" the language, not BLAS, which is common pitfall I see when people compare the two. I guess at this point, a year or so later, it isn't surprising to me anymore that Julia is as fast as it is for these sorts of computational tasks - its been demonstrated pretty comprehensively at this point.