Can you provide any benchmarks which support this as I can provide plenty which don't?
In each case, the language has pointers, however they were not used in the core part of the benchmark. i.e. they didn't get their speed advantage from pointers.
Haskell was the fastest for the thread-ring benchmark, it doesn't have pointers.
If Java had pointers as it does in the sun.misc.Unsafe utility class some code would be faster, but I don't believe this explains why Java is not the fastest in each benchmark. ;)
Object orientated programming is used in a significant portion of all programs, it would be interesting how C/C++ performs in such benchmarks. ;)
Those measurements for programs forced to use just one core on a quad-core machine, you may also be interested in the measurements made when the programs are allowed to use all the cores -
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan...
and also measurements made on x64
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan...
>>The n-body and spectral-norm benchmarks were fastest in Fortran.<<
Maybe we should wonder if the Intel C++ compiler would produce programs comparable to those from the Intel Fortran compiler ;-)
>>Object orientated programming is used in a significant portion of all programs, it would be interesting how C/C++ performs in such benchmarks.<<
Maybe you're suggesting that OO C++ programs wouldn't perform as well as Java programs? But doesn't that highlight the advantage of being able to write programs in different styles?