You can even run into execution deadlines with malloc()/free(), that is why there are companies that made business out of selling specialized versions of them, and nowadays that is only less of a business because there are similar FOSS implementations.
The point is not winning micro-benchmarks games, rather there are specific SLAs for resource consumption and execution deadlines, is the language toolchain able to meet them, when the language features are used as they should, or does it run out of juice to meet those targets?
The recent Guile performance discussion thread is a good example.
If language X does meet the targets, and one still goes for "Rewrite XYZ into ZYW" approach, then we are beyond pure technical considerations.