I've been doing optimization work in C#, and I think findings like this one are unremarkable. I will readily admit C# is slower and less flexible than say C++,

I've been doing optimization work in C#, and I think findings like this one are unremarkable. I will readily admit C# is slower and less flexible than say C++, but for small things, I can always beat calling out to external code by writing optimized C#. This is usually because even a slower language like C# is still good enough to make the cost of marshalling objects or an IAT lookup become far more costly than the difference between the optimized C++ and C#. I don't know if thats the reason here, but I have my suspicions.