Since you have specified larry's name here I will give Larry's answer for this Question.

Larry says in Perl Faq

Larry's standard answer for this is to send your script to me (Tom Christiansen) with appropriate supplications and offerings. :-( That's because there's no automatic machine translator. Even if you were, you wouldn't gain a lot, as most of the external programs would still get called. It's the same problem as blind translation into C: you're still apt to be bogged down by exec()s. You have to analyze the dataflow and algorithm and rethink it for optimal speedup. It's not uncommon to see one, two, or even three orders of magnitude of speed difference between the brute-force and the recoded approaches.