The issue of primitive performance seems to be in the background of how algorithms are implemented, which BLAS is running, compilation to server architecture, etc. One might measure the performance of 'very specific language primitives' directly for those language primitives. Stripping out confounding factors feels fundamental.

Of course, such a benchmark it might not have the same marketing hue as claiming that Julia is 553 times faster than Matlab at parsing an integer, for example.