I just ran Wes's benchmarks (not the BLAS call versions) on my machine with a Julia I built on 10/13 (17c3c13), and the timings have indeed improved. For the details, see this gist: https://gist.github.com/3901139 (including the comment I posted on it).

The highlight is

numpy: (x * y).sum() => 41.1 ms

julia: inner(x,y) => 37.4 ms

julia: x*y => 19.5 ms

cython: inner(x,y) => 13.8 ms

The numpy and Julia versions are much easier to write and run.

Disclaimers: I've never written or built cython code before just now, and I think Julia is the coolest.

EDIT: whoops, missed the most important one (inner() written in pure Julia). Added it. Any thoughts on why inner() in Julia isn't faster?