Yeah, the thing about low-level languages like C is that they are so tied to the machine -- and CPUs are now immensely complex beasts --- that your program, to

Yeah, the thing about low-level languages like C is that they are so tied to the machine -- and CPUs are now immensely complex beasts --- that your program, to be fast, has to be written to take advantage of that machine's characteristics: using target-specific intrinsics (e.g. SSE, AVX) or designing data structures around the size of the cache line. Whereas a higher-level language can truly abstract over of all these things, and perform target-specific optimizations where it sees them.