There was a suggestion to do a shootout between scripting languages. It
was mostly done already, though not in the context of an embedded
editor.
Check this site for comparisons: http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/
This is by no means complete or correct, the author says that many of
the programs can possibly be optimized further.
I believe that the best thing that we can get from this is to see how
various programs look, speed is not so much of a matter, Most of the
needed scripts will not pass a second anyway.
--
Baruch Even
http://baruch.ev-en.org/
