Couldn't carefully crafted C pretty much fix every potential case where another language could beat it? Yes, but one runs into the same problems as for careful

Couldn't carefully crafted C pretty much fix every potential case where another language could beat it? Yes, but one runs into the same problems as for carefully crafted assembly: - People who have the skills necessary to produce "carefully crafted" code don't come cheap. - All careful crafting often ties the code to a specific target platform. For example, the gyrations one might through to make the code more SIMD-friendly might be detrimental to performance on a platform that lacks SIMD.