Indeed. And that's if you wrote in machine code.

But my proof is a little simpler, and more germane to the OPs situation. 10e7 takes three seconds, and that's just returning a constant, albeit not an optimised away one.

C:\test>perl -MTime::HiRes=time 
-E"sub t{1}; $t=time; $x=t()for 1..1e7; printf qq[%f\n], time()-$t"
3.305000
[download]

Not hard to verify.