perl >= 5.10 has gotten pretty bulky compared to older versions.

I'm a bit curious as to how fast the newest ruby and python run the same algorithms.

I bet if you would run the same code under perl 5.6 it would run a lot faster (the C data structures behind perl 5.6's variables are a lot more light weight). At least based on a very informal test we did here: Re^3: Why is this code so much slower than the same algorithm in C?.