In my (admittedly very poor) testing, Nim can get to within 5% or so of C speeds for simple benchmarks-it compiles to pretty decently optimized C, and then can

In my (admittedly very poor) testing, Nim can get to within 5% or so of C speeds for simple benchmarks-it compiles to pretty decently optimized C, and then can use LLVM/Clang as a backend to take advantage of all the amazing optimization work being done there, so in the end you have code that is very similarly performant to C.