The vroom R package is likely the fastest R package in read speed, not the ones used in this article. vroom was 13.1x faster than R's fread/data.table based on the read performance benchmark in https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/vroom/vignettes/benc... so may be similar or faster in read speed vs julia.
Vroom is lazy though: it doesn’t parse until you access the data. That’s a very different approach, which is why it’s no direct comparison. You’ll note that data.table, which is compared in the article, is faster than vroom’s default configuration when it comes to whole table scans, which would be the appropriate comparison. If the data is mostly numeric, then data.table is faster for all configurations. That said, if you don’t plan to access most of the data in a data set, then vrooms lazy approach can be as big win.