That's a good link. The n-body and spectral-norm benchmarks were fastest in Fortran. The fannkuch benchmark was fastest in Ada. The Mandlebrot benchmark was fastest in ATS.

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. ;)