>Conventional wisdom says that no programming language is faster than C, and all higher level languages (such as Haskell) are doomed to be much slower because o

>Conventional wisdom says that no programming language is faster than C, and all higher level languages (such as Haskell) are doomed to be much slower because of their distance from the real machine. No: conventional wisdom just says that no higher level programming language is consistently faster than C AND/OR better to reason about with regards to memory consumption and runtime behaviour. (Conventional wisdom also adds fortran, forth, Ada and C++ in the same "speedy" category). Conventional wisdom adds that micro-benchmarks of some BS outlier examples (Java where the JIT can take advantage of some known condition to do something clever, etc) do not matter in real life programs, which are far more complex. Conventional wisdom also adds that C to be speedier it doesn't even have to be highly optimized or carefully crafted by some C programming wizard or anything. Merely avoiding gross mistakes (like using an algorithm of the wrong complexity for the job) will do. Conventional wisdom concludes that writing in your high level language in an unconventional (non idiomatic) way to get to "as fast a C" speeds is bullshit too, because it doesn't represent idiomatic (and far more common) high level language use.