You’re right of course – the focus was on API stability, not optimizations, but…
Julia 1.0 and 0.7 (which, Juan, are essentially the same, except dep warnings in 0.7 are errors in 1.0) are definitely faster than 0.6. It’s pretty common to see a free 10% improvement or more, but it varies.
There was also a thread a few months ago referencing an econ article that benchmarked a bunch of languages, including Julia 0.2.
Julia 0.6 did much better than Julia 0.2 relative to a few other languages. Here’s the thread: A Comparison of Programming Languages in Economics - #4 by tkoolen
Julia 1.0 also starts much faster than Julia 0.6. Fantastic work all around.