Measured : Which programming language is fastest?

My question is if anyone here has any experience with simplistic benchmarking and could tell me which things to test for in order to get a simple idea of each language's general performance?

There's more than one right answer.

As-fast-as C [pdf] or as-fast-as SSE and AVX?

Answer for a few un-optimised fannkuch-redux programs —

Un-optimised single-thread #8 programs transliterated lowest-common-denominator style into different programming languages from the same original.

	source code	secs	mem	gz
	C gcc #8	39.33	19,492	483
	Java #8	45.90	42,568	517
	Node.js #8	58.06	51,484	452
	PHP #8	28 min	19,700	477
	Ruby yjit #8	33 min	20,736	418
	Python 3 #8	37 min	19,312	414

Or choose your answer for Rust and Julia and Haskell and … crowd sourced fannkuch-redux programs.

Answer for the fastest 200 contributed programs —

Eight simple tasks. A couple of dozen different programming languages. Altogether about 200 programs that are faster than the other crowd-sourced same-language-implementation programs.

Explore the measurements with box plot charts — medians, dispersion, skew.

The median-line for some language implementation groups seems to fall outside the IQR box for other groups. Choose your answer for likely differences between the groups.