eli5: How is C still the fastest mainstream language?

Question

I’ve heard that lots of languages come close, but how has a faster language not been created for over 50 years?

Excluding assembly.

In: 2072

Answer 1

C isn’t necessarily the fastest anymore. There’s a bit of contention for that title right now with the much younger Rust language.

As to why C is so fast compared to most others, when a program is written in C there’s a bunch of computation that’s handled up front once referred to as “compilation” (translation of human readable code to computer readable binary, not all languagesfo this and it’s one of the major differencesbetween slow languagesand fast ones) and the compiler (program that does the translating) for C is very smart and looks for ways to optimize your code while it’s compiling.