I think there are a few different definitions of "faster" that can all be useful in different situations: 1. faster when written and optimized by an expert, wh

I think there are a few different definitions of "faster" that can all be useful in different situations: 1. faster when written and optimized by an expert, who writes the best blog on how to optimize X 2. faster when written and optimized by a competent-but-not-necessarily-expert programmer, who reads the best blog on how to optimize X 3. faster when written without speed in mind It seems like C, C++, and Rust are all more or less tied at the head of the pack for #1 and #2. There's obviously a lot of room for debate here, but it seems like many other languages (Go? JavaScript running on V8?) can get pretty close for #1 but struggle for #2. For #3, it seems like C is the king, because of the very low-level style that it forces on the programmer. Below that things get murky. I'm inclined to believe Rust does well here, because it doesn't usually allocate without being asked to, but I assume the same logic applies to other languages I'm less familiar with (D, Zig). How well C++ does probably depends on how you interpret the question. (Like does the programmer make even the slightest effort to avoid implicitly copying big data structures, to take things by reference, etc?)