With the latest upgrade of the NumericExtensions package, the performance of some reduction functions are considerably improved.
The sum, maximum/minimum functions are considerably more efficient than the ones in Base (e.g. sum(x) is 2x faster with the same level of accuracy using cascade sum, and ``sum(x, 1)`` is nearly 3x faster, and sum(x, 2) is nearly 10x faster).
In the new implementation, these functions no longer rely on functors, which make them easier to migrate. If there's no objection, I will work on a PR to julia base soon.