[pjmlp]

The irony of "as fast as C" comparison, is that anyone doing 8 and 16 bit coding on home micros remembers how lousy C compilers used to be (like most other high level languages), to the point that any junior Assembly developer could easily write much better code.

Any language can eventually reach that point with enough money, time, and in C's case doing 200+ optimizations with unexpected results.