The relative speed of various languages depends much more on what is being done with them, and how the programs are written, than the inherent “speed of” the language implementation itself.   If you are moving lots of data around, for example, page-faults are likely to bite you no matter how you write it.   And, if you are doing a totally CPU-intensive gut-busting operation (likewise for a very I/O-intensive one...), it’s not likely to be too pretty.   Where all of these languages shine is when they’re able to give you instant access to well-designed hashes, lists, arrays, memory-management and so on through a tiny amount of actual source-code.   Bang for your buck.