Julia would have been a much better and more cost effective choice in my opinion. It's a superior platform to on which develop this sort of thing, and further along at that. Also easier to use.
Julia doesn't have a debugger... They specifically claimed this is a very important thing. In my experience, Julia has also inscrutable scoping rules, a slow REPL, and it's only fast if you don't count the "startup time" of having to precompile everything.
Re: Debugger, fair enough but it's in the works
Re: Scoping rules, these are being evaled.
Re; startup time, already better in 1.1, and will soon be marginalized from two ends: Better static compilation and better tiered compilation.