[lmm]

> Like, in the sense that you can transpile any bit of Python or Lisp or Haskell or Rust or JS into C but the opposite isn’t necessarily true because not all those language support all the features exposed in C (such as goto, no bounds checking, pointer arithmetic, etc.), any algorithm for say parsing JSON can be expressed equally as efficiently in C, while a clever and hacky C-specific algorithm cannot necessarily be expressed in those higher level languages.

This isn't true though. Just off the top of my head: C doesn't expose the carry flag directly, C doesn't let you write signed arithmetic using twos-complement overflow, C doesn't let you share a value between separate compilation units without allowing it to be mutated...

"faster" or "slower" is a pretty terrible metric anyway, given that most projects do not have infinite developer time available. But it's very hard to benchmark "equivalent developer effort" between two different languages.