I have to back up ModernMech here. C with -O0 is not very fast on any compiler that has it (by design) which is most. Nor is the output of barely optimizing co

I have to back up ModernMech here. C with -O0 is not very fast on any compiler that has it (by design) which is most. Nor is the output of barely optimizing compilers like tinycc/tcc. Saying "C is inherently fast" is very naive. Moreover, it is also untrue on the other side of this axis - you can often go much faster. Even with -Ofast or -Omax or whatever there are still (often) opportunities for SIMD vectorization on modern machines that autovec cannot find. Most C compilers provide (not really standardized) escape hatches to assembly in various ways for that last 2..64X speed-up (single thread). (Yes, avx512/8-bits=64 wide vectors these days.) Finally, whether it "has a runtime" in the sense of automatic memory management, well, that just depends upon how you link programs. Link with -lboehm and you can never free (and, yes, allocations become potentially expensive). These Rust conversations are unfortunately prone to absolutist statements that indicate very narrow exposure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_garbage_collector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_garbage_collector