I was befuddled by your talk of "C executables" into thinking you were new to the concept of compilers, interpreters and executable code, maybe you are. "Executables" are generally considered independently of the language that was used to create them so it is unusual to talk of C Executables.

If is not universally the case that interpreted languages can be compiled. In the general case it is not true that Perl can be compiled in the usual sense to generate an executable. There are packaging tools that pack a Perl script up with everything it depends on and a Perl interpreter into and executable that is unpacked at run time, but that is not compiling. There are compilers that can compile scripts written in a subset of Perl, but those aren't Perl compilers either.

You are right to think that raw time of execution is almost never interesting these days and that will become more true as time goes on. The more important metric is ease of maintenance and that points directly at documentation, automated testing and perhaps code coverage metrics.