I don't think those contortions are all that crazy compared to what you have to do in C though anyways. And you can choose where to spend your effort in optimizing functions.
Sometimes, a function really is performance critical so you spend a ton of time fiddling with it to make it blazing fast, other times you write something non-optimal but straightforward. It's all the same language though, and unlike tools like Cython, you don't lose all your nice high level language features when you drop down to 'high performance julia code'.
