Perl is not necessarily faster than C at all string manipulation, but it does have some handy features that makes short work of more complicated functionality. See here: http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/06/27/ctoperl.html
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.
It's just a misguided benchmark. It contains statements such as "Java applications cannot match a fraction of other language's performance." That's in contrast with the experience of companies such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Yammer.
The point is, at least in the case of Twitter, they switched from Ruby to Java/Scala because they needed performance. Before that you could have been forgiven for thinking twitter was just a static page displaying the fail whale.
s?on the web?when you can scale your infrastructure horizontally using asynchronous, connectionless queries distributed across a global network with large peers, layers of caching and a set of uniform standards to interact with client/server applications?g
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.