Language performance contest

May I propose a tiny contest?

I have noticed a few arguments on the board highlighting the performance issues of C/C++ compared to C#/Java. I was wondering if it would be possible to have a contest to see who can write an application to do something the fastest in whatever language they chose.

I understand its not just the language but the person writing the code, that's why I would like to do it here as most people here are pretty knowledgeable.

The program we'd write would need to be something that tests lots of a languages features - a bit of string parsing, file I/O, calculations etc.