[beagle3]

While I don't necessarily agree with his claims, it is true that there's a huge gap of about 10-15 years between when FORTRAN compilers did some optimizations and when C compilers were able to do them (and only if you properly annotated things with __restrict, etc). I used FORTRAN77 compilers in the early 1990s that did vectorization / pipelining of the kind C compilers started doing in the last decade.

The main reason, though, is that in FORTRAN, the aliasing rules allow the compiler to assume basically anything, whereas C has sequence points and a (super weak) memory model which don't. But I wouldn't say it is C's fault.