Julia would still require the garbage collector but I don't think the downvotes here are fair at all. If there was a language that would be a natural transition to people used to javascript but wanting native speed, julia would be it. In a way it is a glimpse of what javascript could have been given a lot of experience and much more design.

So how big are the Julia binaries? Would it still need a VM?

At the moment actually that would be a pretty big problem, the dependencies are very large, mostly because that hasn't been a priority I think.

There has been work released recently which allows programs to be compiled to native binaries if they aren't dynamically evaluating anything however.

Yea I meant the native binaries in the recent ahead of time compilation work.