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 was designed to be efficient by providing direct access to memory via address pointers. It also has the benefit of having a large coding base and decades of support that have allowed the developers to improve the efficiency by making use of individual target machines’ assembly language enhanced instructions.

On the downside, C accomplishes its speed by not automatically adding typical bounds checking (arithmetic overflows, array overruns, pointer validity) that are often built into other languages.