[jjgreen]

It used to be "folk knowledge" that only Fortran and hand-crafted ASM were faster. Not sure if that's still (or ever was) true.

[hajile]

I guess it was maybe true one time.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

[tammerk]

I agree but I didn't consider these while saying C is the fastest. These are not "general purpose", like you don't write your db, browser, http server or game engine with these.