Perhaps, but don't forget that the Perl-XS barrier is an expensive one to cross. Every call from Perl to C and from C to Perl creates memory accesses and runs lots of code.

I found this out firsthand working on a QuakeIII Perl API. During development I took a lot of shit from the QuakeIII people about how Perl would be too slow to write a QuakeIII bot (which is basically a simple AI project). I thought I could beat the system with a mix of Perl and XS. Well, I was wrong.

-sam