Strictly speaking it's meaningless, since a language is a set of syntax and semantics. Pragmatically though, when people talk about the speed of a language they

Strictly speaking it's meaningless, since a language is a set of syntax and semantics. Pragmatically though, when people talk about the speed of a language they actually mean the typical performance of processes defined by programs written in that language, which of course depends on the code generator and runtime, among other things. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing a fully standards compliant C interpreter that will have considerably slower process execution after all. In fact, a quick search shows that it's been done many times, for example this[1]. [1] https://github.com/jpoirier/picoc https://github.com/jpoirier/picoc