Mathematica does several optimizations before execution, and as such can exploit a priori knowledge of many problems.

The danger of course is when Wolfram takes those assumptions into a room of mathematicians. It is controversial for all the wrong reasons. =)

Julia already is a very high-level mathematics-oriented programming language, though.

The reason Mathematica is so much faster here is it’s using a different algorithm. When you compare using the same algorithm, Julia is 10-100x faster than Mathematica. https://julialang.org/benchmarks/