Results in Java are not representative because they use the String type for concatenation tests instead of the recommended practice of using a StringBuilder for extensive concatenations.
Still I'd love to see the same benchmarks done with more idiomatic code.
Will somebody explain to me what's going on? Maybe I'm missing something.
Sometimes Perl does things more uniformly across different systems than would be done on a single system with a different language like C. For example, this is Perl's malloc implementation: http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/7742aa6637b99424497e...
Depending on what you are doing, Perl may have a more efficient way of tackling the problem. This isn't to say you couldn't do it in that exact same way in a different language and find a faster result; it's just that Perl already does things efficiently, so you don't have to spend time tuning algorithms.