I agree it's not really an argument, but I think the implementation of the Go compilers is evidence towards his point. The compilers were straightforward and d

I agree it's not really an argument, but I think the implementation of the Go compilers is evidence towards his point. The compilers were straightforward and didn't use fancy representations or optimizations AFAIK (being based on old Plan 9 compilers). And with that philosophy, I believe it was within 2-3x of C++ in most benchmarks, despite being in a higher level language (though no doubt it's much slower on some benchmarks). That said, they continue to optimize the compilers (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9099744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9099744). People obviously do want speed; 2x slower isn't acceptable in many cases.