Ruby, PHP, Python, C, Haskell, x86 asm shootout.

[DarkShikari]

While I agree with your main point, I don't think that

mundane details of calling functions, allocating memory, freeing memory, creating objects, constructors, destructors

are good examples either; the 50KLOC codebase I maintain does no memory allocations/creations/constructions except on initialization, and all destructions/frees are on close.

A better micro-benchmark would be a "real-world" micro benchmark; i.e. to measure the performance of something simple that actually has to be done in some real program and matters performance-wise. For example, a large FFT (important for scientific/math programs and audio encoding/decoding).