> However, C on LLVM or GCC should probably be considered the “upper bound” when it comes to how well a program can be optimized, and thus the benchmark for any performance measurement.
Is it? Isn't it rather the case that C is too low level to express intent and (hence) offer room to optimize? I would expect that a language in which, e.g. matrix multiplication can be natively expressed, could be compiled to more efficient code for such.
I would rather expect, that for compilers which don't optimize well, C is the easiest to produce fairly efficient code for (well, perhaps BCPL would be even easier, but nobody wants to use that these days).
Is it? Isn't it rather the case that C is too low level to express intent and (hence) offer room to optimize? I would expect that a language in which, e.g. matrix multiplication can be natively expressed, could be compiled to more efficient code for such.
I would rather expect, that for compilers which don't optimize well, C is the easiest to produce fairly efficient code for (well, perhaps BCPL would be even easier, but nobody wants to use that these days).