...it's an oversimplification to state that perl cannot achieve the same performance as C/C++ ... where 99% of the time is spent deep within optimized libraries and perl (or any scripting language) is used to initialize and facilitate interaction, then it is quite possible that no material performance hit will result ... only profiling can really reveal this ... ...and perl / PHP / whatever is a MUCH easier on ramp than getting into deep C++ OO structures...