In the vast majority of cases, barring painstaking optimization, you will probably find that selecting an appropriate algorithm will have a much larger effect on program run time than the language the program is written.

Not particularly tuned; tested on a 6 year old computer:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Time::HiRes qw/ tv_interval gettimeofday/;

my $time0 = [gettimeofday];

use warnings;
use strict;

my $max = 100;

my @primes = ( 2, 3 );  #seed the primes

my $this = $primes[-1];
while ( $max > scalar @primes ) {
    $this += 2;
    my $sqrt = $this**.5;
    for (@primes) {
        if ( $_ > $sqrt ) {
            push @primes, $this;
            last;
        }
        next if $this % $_;
        last;
    }
}

my $elapsed = tv_interval( $time0, [gettimeofday] );
print "Printing the first $max numbers that are prime... \n";
print "$_ is prime.\n" for @primes;
print "Took $elapsed seconds.";
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Printing the first 100 numbers that are prime...
2 is prime.
3 is prime.
5 is prime.
...
...
521 is prime.
523 is prime.
541 is prime.
Took 0.00096 seconds.