"if", "could", "occasionally....practically the same".... you're talking about a lot of theoretical fringe cases to produce similar yet not the same performance

"if", "could", "occasionally....practically the same".... you're talking about a lot of theoretical fringe cases to produce similar yet not the same performance results. And to what end? You're not disproving my point if you have to invent a use case where C is crippled to the point that Javascript is only "practically the same". Sorry, but that's just hypothetical hokum. There's no denying that a lot of optimisations can occur with (and for want a better term) "scripting" languages. Nor that "scripting" languages aren't serious tools for serious development these days. But I also think it's fair to say that one language would out perform another in an idiomatic like-for-like contest - simply because those languages that trade in raw CPU performance do so at the gain of development time / productivity or application portability. Thankfully these days most target platforms are powerful enough that we don't need to go that low level in pursuit of performance. And even on many popular cloud services / web sites where micro-optimisations can quickly multiply, productivity is often still a critical metric (case in point: I've barely touched C++ in recent years yet have written thousands of lines of Go, Perl, Javascript, etc). So rather than arguing hypothetical fringe cases, we really should be praising praising the "slower" languages for providing useful abstractions.