Forth and Fortran would like to have a word with you :) But seriously, I would expect the maximum possible performance on today's architectures to come from th

Forth and Fortran would like to have a word with you :) But seriously, I would expect the maximum possible performance on today's architectures to come from the infamous sufficently smart compiler that can do bytecode generation at runtime. That can at least in theory produce programs faster than any system restricted to ahead-of-time operations, including handwritten AOT assembly. Whatever language can make that practical without having some other crippling performance issue might be able to consistently leave C and every other AOT language in the dust.