> … not very useful for comparing performance of any decent language.
Saying "any decent language" assumes we know without measurement the very thing that we need to measure.
Showing "very similar performance characteristics" is a valid outcome.
Then you add multi-threading, and see a decent improvement, e.g. from 5 seconds to 1.5 seconds on 4 cores (almost all implementations show a similar gain)
And some languages with support for Vector operations further improves this to 0.7s
So this benchmark seems to be not very useful for comparing performance of any decent language. It could however be used for comparing improvements of using different techniques to solve the problem, or to showcase what new features brings to the table.