I will not be surprised if it beats C as it will be then, by generating C code itself, but C code that no human would write by hand. It has been done before in

I will not be surprised if it beats C as it will be then, by generating C code itself, but C code that no human would write by hand. It has been done before in programming history (not just C, fortran has been beaten as well http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=200989 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=200989 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-19014-8_11 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-19014-8_1... http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.150.640&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.150... although the prior art focuses on Lisp I think Haskell and ML like languages are better equipped for this). Imperative code is a lot harder to reason about, and low level code is a lot harder to write if one cares about correctness and performance simultaneously. Specialized functional languages has a history of beating C implementations. It could be faster still if one removes the constraint that one has to generate C code, for example coroutines and proper tail calls become easier to implement. The bottomline is that correctness is easier to achieve with functional, and performance with imperative. So we would need both and they meet in a compiler. Take the example of Stalin and StalinGrad, they are Lisps. Their compile times are epic, but once done they have a history of generating faster code than C for specific applications (a specific example where it will excel is multidimensional numeric integration where the function to be integrated is passed as an input). The main reason why they would be able to generate faster code is that they are smarter about inlining. The reason they are smarter about inlining is that programmers intent is better preserved when encoded in a higher level language. Can a programmer not write the same code in C by hand ? Sure they can, but it will take longer and would be more error prone and likely to be costlier to produce, unless one takes the help of these higher level abstractions primitives, but then you aren't really writing in C anymore. Can the C compiler not be equally smart ? possibly, but it will be a lot harder to make a C compiler smart than a functional language compiler smart. Functional languages leave a lot of room for the compiler to do its thing, C while not as bad as Java still over-specifies how exactly something needs to be computed (my way or the highway). Add the fact that when code is written in a higher level, but optimization friendly language one can enjoy the benefits of compiler techniques yet to come. It future-proofs the code to an extent and amortizes the effort that went into writing the compiler. Now of course one can use C++ template metaprogramming to do much of the inlining that Stalin does, but then again you are essentially using a functional programming paradigm. EDIT: HN easy on the downvote. You may not agree with stephencanon but there was nothing in his comment that deserves a downvote, seriously ! @stephencanon compensated to the best of my ability.