Probably because C doesn't have a garbage collector or interpreter. And despite all the evidence suggesting that bytecode interpreters on top of JIT compilers w

Probably because C doesn't have a garbage collector or interpreter. And despite all the evidence suggesting that bytecode interpreters on top of JIT compilers with generational GC is plenty fast enough for a huge number of applications, with additional benefits like memory safety and lower development time, devs are still convinced that big == bad and slow. Maybe. Probably not as bad and slow as you think it is. .NET and Java really don't have the performance overhead that everyone thinks they do, but a corollary of that is C and C++ aren't as fast as you think they are. All that GC tuning you see on JVMs is the same work you do converting to data oriented code in your favorite systems language, you're just fighting the memory wall. While GC's can do it smarter than a human can, they just can't do it for free.