However I have good news for you. The Parrot project is creating a new version of Perl, and is very concerned with performance considerations. If you want to be of assistance, you could try implementing the shootout test suite in Parrot byte-code, submit that to the project, and identify specific performance issues that you uncover.

While I'm all up for performance shakeouts, one thing to keep in mind is that this version of the shootout needs Debian-installable packages of the languages in question to add them to the test. (So if someone wants to build a debian installer target for the Makefile... :)