I agree with you that there are broad, loose categories. The only thing I object to is splitting C out from category 1 and putting it into some kind of category 0.
I'm not? I'm literally saying C, Rust, Zig, Odin, and any other manually memory managed language that compiles straight to machine code is the fastest category you can have, because at that point your bumping against literal hardware limitations. There is no category below them in terms of performance.
"None faster" means you can't just change languages like you could from Java to C (assuming you can write quality code in both) and see a substantial performance boost.
> Of course nothing is going to be faster then C, ... because there's no way to be faster. It's physically impossible.
This reads to me as if you're saying C is in a class of its own. That may not be what you meant! But it's what I understood. C is the fastest language, period, and others may approach its speed (which is the ... part) but cannot surpass it. This is different than something like "C, Rust, Zig, and Odin are roughly the fastest languages."
Anyway, it's all good, we understand each other now. Sorry for appearing overly pedantic.
"None faster" means you can't just change languages like you could from Java to C (assuming you can write quality code in both) and see a substantial performance boost.