If one is working on small (<= 15 by 15) matrices, the StaticArrays module [1] is also native Julia and is much faster than Base.Array. Since a StaticArray knows its own size after type inference, they are allocated on the stack, which is nice.
One downside is that unless you're doing BLAS-style operations, writing non-trivial transformations of StaticArrays always seems to require generated functions.
Anyway, I think this is a feature that numpy doesn't provide.
