The /r/programming discussion of this is interesting [1].
Someone does a Go version and gets the same speed as GNU yes. Someone else tries several languages. This person got the same speed in luajit, and faster in m4 and php. Ruby and perl about 10% slower, python2 about 10% slower still, and python3 about half that. The code is given for all of these, and subsequent comments improved python3 about 50% from his results, but still not up to python2.
Someone does a Go version and gets the same speed as GNU yes. Someone else tries several languages. This person got the same speed in luajit, and faster in m4 and php. Ruby and perl about 10% slower, python2 about 10% slower still, and python3 about half that. The code is given for all of these, and subsequent comments improved python3 about 50% from his results, but still not up to python2.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6gxf02/how_is_...