https://kostya.github.io/LangArena/
Nim is only about 80% slower, which is quite good.
I agree that this kind of benchmark is not really meaningful for practical cases, and reflects mainly the different levels of optimizations.
Having said that, this benchmark is slightly different from traditional ones. According to its github README, the different implementations are translated from an original version in Crystal, by AI tools. See https://github.com/kostya/LangArena?tab=readme-ov-file#origin--approach
In some sense, this benchmark is fairer than the traditional ones where different people write different implementations. Of course, there are still many factors which can affect the implementations in different languages.
We can see Crystal has higher score. Maybe because it is the original, human-made version. Zig got scores quite different from other systems programming lang maybe because it is new so not much resource the AI can exploit. The reason that Nim is slower may be also similar.
However, languages like C# and Java are also slower than C/C++/Rust. Given that these are popular languages, this might mean GC has indeed some impact on performance?
I have the impression that the recent version of Nim's GC is pretty close to C++/Rust, so the difference there is interesting.