[edsac_xyzw]

Matlab and its Simulink extension, which is widely used for designing control system has a feature for generating C code that can be deployed without Matlab runtime. Someone with knowledge of code generation and compilers could take this Matlab feature as an inspiration and implement a C code generator for Julia functions.

> Right now, it appears like a niche interpreted language for numeric geeks only.

Yes, it was designed for numerical and scientific computing. In Julia, you can at least prototype the numerical algorithm before implementing in C++ or Fortran.