The funny thing about GraalVM is that some workloads are actually slower because of some of the dynamic optimisations the JVM applies. Picking the right garbage

The funny thing about GraalVM is that some workloads are actually slower because of some of the dynamic optimisations the JVM applies. Picking the right garbage collector can make a Java program execute faster than when precompiled to native instructions. I'm sure the same would happen when writing C for the JVM. Tricks like dynamically rearranging/compressing pointers and altering structs to better suit the cache lines and data locality properties of the system code is running on can probably boost any major C program, but that's an incredibly complex change to a C program that the JVM just gives you for free.