Fortran has been faster than C, because C has aliasing, preventing optimizations. At least for decades this was why for some applications Fortran was just faste

Fortran has been faster than C, because C has aliasing, preventing optimizations. At least for decades this was why for some applications Fortran was just faster. It's not just "a sufficiently smart compiler", without completely unrealistic (as in "halting problem" unrealistic, in the general case) "smartness". So no, C is inherently slower than some other languages.