[aw1621107]

I think one additional factor that should be taken into account is the amount of effort required to achieve a given level of performance, as well as what extensions you're willing to accept. C with potentially non-portable constructs (intrinsics, inline assembly, etc.) and an unlimited amount of effort put into it provides a performance ceiling, but it's not inconceivable that other programming languages could achieve an equal level of performance with less effort, especially if you compare against plain standard C. Languages like ISPC that expose SIMD/parallelism in a more convenient manner is one example of this.

Another somewhat related example is Fortran and C, where one reason Fortran could perform better than C is the restrictions Fortran places on aliasing. In theory, one could use restrict in C to replicate these aliasing restrictions, but in practice restrict is used fairly sparingly, to the point that when Rust tried to enable its equivalent it had to back out the change multiple times because it kept exposing bugs in LLVM's optimizer.