I don't know if anyone will ever read this thread again :), but just in case, the the current front-page post on Julia provides another nice example of a fast,

I don't know if anyone will ever read this thread again :), but just in case, the the current front-page post on Julia provides another nice example of a fast, dynamically-typed, JITed language (within 1-2x of C, from their own set of benchmarks).