[qsort]

Why would that put C at a disadvantage performance-wise? Array decay is, with hindsight, an unfortunate feature, but optimizing access to contiguous memory is very low-hanging fruit as far as compiler optimizations go.

[rini17]

Some optimizations are low-hanging fruit only if you know length of the array. Which C avoids by design at all costs.

[Gibbon1]

If you want better safety, runtime and compile time performance the lowest hanging fruit would be to fire the C standards committee and hard fork C++/C into C++ and C only ecosystems.