(all discussion about benchmarking and comparing of languages silently ignored *g*)

...but some of the Perl snippets are really bad. I took the time to speed up the 'hash2' by about 15%:

use strict;

my $n = $ARGV[0] || 1;
my %hash1 = ();
for (my $i = 0; $i <= 9999; $i++) {
    $hash1{"foo_$i"} = $i;
}
my %hash2 = ();
for (my $i = 1; $i <= $n; $i++) {
    foreach (keys %hash1) {
        $hash2{$_} += $hash1{$_};
    }
}
print "$hash1{foo_1} $hash1{foo_9999} $hash2{foo_1} $hash2{foo_9999}\n
+";
[download]