If you only got a 2x speedup there is something wrong. A more usual number for Perl is about 100x slower than C++ for numerical code. Perl isn't very different

If you only got a 2x speedup there is something wrong. A more usual number for Perl is about 100x slower than C++ for numerical code. Perl isn't very different than Python in this regard. e.g. on the shootout on the n-body benchmark, Perl is about as fast as Python, and 125x slower than C++.