[dbrueck]

> My claim is that there is no additional information that Python provides as opposed to C that would make it faster

Ok, but that's not what they are claiming - their claim (at least based on what the article is saying) is more about one toolchain vs another, i.e. "if you use our compiler (that takes python code as input) then the resulting executable will run as fast (or possibly faster than) programs created by all the popular compilers (that take C/C++ code as input)." The sales pitch is that they've got magic sauce in their compiler, and you get to use Python as well.

[paro_nej]

Beating gcc/clang/icc is not a trivial task. One can engineer the pair `{benchmark compiler pass}` in such a manner that they show a speedup, but over a benchmark suite say like the SPEC suite, general community consensus is that it is very difficult and their paper doesn't reveal that they've found a secret sauce (sauce := compiler pass).