> You can easily observe in any cross-language shootout in 2024 that optimized code bases in the various languages still have gradients and we do not live in a

> You can easily observe in any cross-language shootout in 2024 that optimized code bases in the various languages still have gradients and we do not live in a world where you can just start slamming out Python code and expect no performance delta against C. Microbenchmarks may show an advantage for C - but it's one that is shrinking all the time (and that goes doubly for Java, which was the go-to example in the original "sufficiently smart compiler" conversations - but no longer is, because you can't actually be confident that Java is going to perform worse than C any more). And the overwhelming majority of the time, for real-world business problems, people do just start slamming out Python code, and if anything it tends to perform better. And conversely even those C programs now rely extremely heavily on compiler smartness to reorder instructions, autovectorise, etc., often producing something quite radically different from what a naive reading of the code would mean - and there is no real appetite for a language that doesn't do this, one with semantics designed to perform well on today's CPUs or GPUs. Which suggests that designing the language semantics for performance is not actually particularly important.