Indeed. OCaml is an interesting exception, though: it's very high-level, yet still quite fast. (The trade-off, if you can call it that, is that you have to work

Indeed. OCaml is an interesting exception, though: it's very high-level, yet still quite fast. (The trade-off, if you can call it that, is that you have to work within its type system.) It's not necessarily as fast as (or faster than) C, but even relatively naive OCaml code is often only about 50% slower. There's often a point of diminishing returns in spending time and effort optimizing C, and OCaml can get surprisingly close with much less work.