The abstractions in the language don't have to be a significant obstacle to performance. In fact, if the language provides the right abstractions, you can probably improve on most C implementations of an algorithm just by using some well-optimized built-in abstractions. Perl currently doesn't come very close to doing this, though it's relatively quick compared to the other popular dynamic "scripting" languages (Ruby, Python, PHP).

C-style "fixed" typing, especially when dealing with basic numeric types is still hard to beat for a language as dynamic as perl, but as you hinted, a good enough JIT compiler (like Java's) could get pretty close to (and in some cases probably beat) the speed of a C implementation.

A few existing dynamic languages that have good compilers (some need hinted with type declarations at the tight portions of code - which may be cheating, but good Common Lisp implementations use it, and AFAIK they don't even use a JIT compiler), can already come really close to C's speed.

As for performance in dynamic languages in general, I'll also drop a link to clojure here - it's a lisp (dynamic typing included) implemented in Java, which for speed is probably close to the top of dynamic languages and has very interesting multithreading/concurrency properties.

UPDATE It took some time to get it right; I'm new at clojure and the OP's program doesn't translate into idiomatic functional constructs (mainly because the OP's algorithm is stupidly inefficient) - but I've tried to keep it as close to the original constructs as possible:

(defn inner
  [i]
  (loop [j 1]
    (if (= 0 (rem i j))
      (if (< j 20)
        (recur (+ 1 j))
        i)
      nil)))

(defn loops
  []
  (loop [i 20]
    (let [result (inner i)]
      (if result
        (print (format "Number %d\n" result))
        (recur (+ i 20))))))

(defn time-me []
  (time (loops)))
[download]

Results:

(time-me)
Number 232792560
"Elapsed time: 10865.715 msecs"
nil
[download]

For comparison: this is on a 4 months old macbook, where the OPs perl code takes about 19 seconds (which includes compile time, but that's tiny in comparison to the total):

joost-diepenmaats-macbook:~ joost$ time perl test.pl
Number: 232792560

real    0m19.568s
user    0m19.078s
sys    0m0.060s
[download]

updated again to convert tabs to spaces in pasted code, and again because the timing for the clojure code was way off due to stupid programmer syndrome My code is still way slow compared to the OP's reported C time, but about twice as fast as perl - not that bad for one of my first attempts at clojure.

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