这不是语言的问题，而是工具和库的问题。C语言可用的库和编译器比新语言要老得多。你可能认为这会让它们变慢，但事实恰恰相反。

这些库是在处理能力和内存非常重要的时候编写的。它们必须写得非常高效，才能发挥作用。C编译器的开发人员也花了很长时间为不同的处理器进行各种巧妙的优化。C语言的成熟和广泛采用使得它比同时期的其他语言具有显著的优势。它还使C语言在速度上比那些不像C语言那样强调原始性能的新工具更有优势。

在过去，只有两种类型的语言:编译型和解释型。

编译语言利用“编译器”读取语言语法并将其转换为相同的汇编语言代码，这可以直接在CPU上进行。解释型语言使用了几种不同的方案，但从本质上讲，语言语法被转换成一种中间形式，然后在“解释器”(用于执行代码的环境)中运行。

因此，在某种意义上，在代码和机器之间存在另一个“层”——解释器。而且，在计算机中，越多就意味着使用更多的资源。翻译速度较慢，因为他们必须执行更多的操作。

More recently, we've seen more hybrid languages like Java, that employ both a compiler and an interpreter to make them work. It's complicated, but a JVM is faster, more sophisticated and way more optimized than the old interpreters, so it stands a much better change of performing (over time) closer to just straight compiled code. Of course, the newer compilers also have more fancy optimizing tricks so they tend to generate way better code than they used to as well. But most optimizations, most often (although not always) make some type of trade-off such that they are not always faster in all circumstances. Like everything else, nothing comes for free, so the optimizers must get their boast from somewhere (although often times it using compile-time CPU to save runtime CPU).

Getting back to C, it is a simple language, that can be compiled into fairly optimized assembly and then run directly on the target machine. In C, if you increment an integer, it's more than likely that it is only one assembler step in the CPU, in Java however, it could end up being a lot more than that (and could include a bit of garbage collection as well :-) C offers you an abstraction that is way closer to the machine (assembler is the closest), but you end up having to do way more work to get it going and it is not as protected, easy to use or error friendly. Most other languages give you a higher abstraction and take care of more of the underlying details for you, but in exchange for their advanced functionality they require more resources to run. As you generalize some solutions, you have to handle a broader range of computing, which often requires more resources.

保罗。

c++的平均速度更快(就像它最初一样，主要是C的超集，尽管有一些不同)。然而，对于特定的基准测试，通常有另一种更快的语言。

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/

fannjuch-redux是Scala中最快的

n-body和fasta在Ada中更快。

频谱范数在Fortran中是最快的。

反补、mandelbrot和pidigits在ATS中最快。

regex-dna是JavaScript中最快的。

chameneau -redux最快的是Java 7。

Haskell的螺纹环速度最快。

其余的基准测试在C或c++中是最快的。

这实际上是一个长期存在的谎言。虽然C程序确实经常更快，但情况并非总是如此，特别是当C程序员不太擅长它的时候。

人们往往会忘记的一个明显的漏洞是，当程序必须为某种IO阻塞时，比如任何GUI程序中的用户输入。在这些情况下，使用什么语言并不重要，因为您受到数据传入速度的限制，而不是处理数据的速度。在这种情况下，不管你使用的是C、Java、c#甚至Perl;你不能比数据进入的速度更快。

The other major thing is that using garbage collection and not using proper pointers allows the virtual machine to make a number of optimizations not available in other languages. For instance, the JVM is capable of moving objects around on the heap to defragment it. This makes future allocations much faster since the next index can simply be used rather than looking it up in a table. Modern JVMs also don't have to actually deallocate memory; instead, they just move the live objects around when they GC and the spent memory from the dead objects is recovered essentially for free.

This also brings up an interesting point about C and even more so in C++. There is something of a design philosophy of "If you don't need it, you don't pay for it." The problem is that if you do want it, you end up paying through the nose for it. For instance, the vtable implementation in Java tends to be a lot better than C++ implementations, so virtual function calls are a lot faster. On the other hand, you have no choice but to use virtual functions in Java and they still cost something, but in programs that use a lot of virtual functions, the reduced cost adds up.

C语言速度很快，因为它是原生编译的低级语言。但是C不是最快的。递归斐波那契基准测试表明Rust、Crystal和Nim可以更快。

撇开诸如热点优化、预编译元算法和各种形式的并行等高级优化技术不提，语言的基本速度与支持通常在内部循环中指定的操作所需的隐含的幕后复杂性密切相关。

也许最明显的方法是对间接内存引用进行有效性检查——比如检查指针是否为空，检查索引是否符合数组边界。大多数高级语言隐式地执行这些检查，但C不这样做。然而，这并不一定是这些其他语言的基本限制——一个足够聪明的编译器可能能够通过某种形式的循环不变代码运动，从算法的内部循环中删除这些检查。

C语言(在类似程度上与c++密切相关)更基本的优势是严重依赖基于堆栈的内存分配，这本质上是快速的分配、回收和访问。在C(和c++)中，主调用堆栈可用于分配原语、数组和聚合(结构/类)。

虽然C语言确实提供了动态分配任意大小和生命周期的内存的能力(使用所谓的“堆”)，但默认情况下是避免这样做的(而是使用堆栈)。

诱人的是，有时可以在其他编程语言的运行时环境中复制C内存分配策略。asm.js已经证明了这一点，它允许用C或c++编写的代码被翻译成JavaScript的子集，并以接近本机的速度安全地运行在web浏览器环境中。

As somewhat of an aside, another area where C and C++ outshine most other languages for speed is the ability to seamlessly integrate with native machine instruction sets. A notable example of this is the (compiler and platform dependent) availability of SIMD intrinsics which support the construction of custom algorithms that take advantage of the now nearly ubiquitous parallel processing hardware -- while still utilizing the data allocation abstractions provided by the language (lower-level register allocation is managed by the compiler).