Oh, it does? I've taken to saying that "zero-based indexing – that's how Julia broke my heart", because at the time, I didn't get the impression that there was anything else in sight. How do I index based on zero?
If you read the OP again carefully, you'll see that you can use offset arrays for every array you make and suffer no performance penalty, because the offset is compiled away. And the development overhead is a single library import call; I replace core language data-structures all the time in any language for features I want, this is no different.
See my other comment in the thread for the thing I've always wondered: How can you compile away an arbitrary calculation that might need to be made at run time?
(assuming we're not just arguing over arbitrary-array indexing to input predefined constants at the REPL/code level).