This makes Perl an attractive technology for me because of its simple hash table interface.

Yeah, but the implementation is focussed on Perl. It's certainly not a wrapper around an external C library. It won't be simple to lift the hash implementation out of perl, and adapt it for another language, and still have something that blends well with that language.

only C and Fortran are taken seriously as High performance programming languages

There may be a few others (or not...), but Perl certainly isn't known for being suitable as a "high performance" language when it comes to number crunching, or dealing with massive amounts of in-memory data.