我还没有听说过Fortan比C快得多，但是可以想象在某些情况下它会更快。关键不在于语言特征的存在，而在于那些(通常)不存在的特征。

一个例子是C指针。C指针几乎到处都在使用，但指针的问题是编译器通常无法判断它们是否指向同一个数组的不同部分。

例如，如果你写了一个strcpy例程，看起来像这样:

strcpy(char *d, const char* s)
{
  while(*d++ = *s++);
}

编译器必须在d和s可能是重叠数组的假设下工作。所以当数组重叠时，它不能执行会产生不同结果的优化。正如您所期望的，这在很大程度上限制了可以执行的优化类型。

[我应该注意到，C99有一个“restrict”关键字，显式地告诉编译器指针不重叠。还要注意，Fortran也有指针，语义不同于C语言，但指针不像C语言那样无处不在。

但是回到C与Fortran的问题上，可以想象，Fortran编译器能够执行一些对于(直接编写的)C程序可能无法实现的优化。所以我不会对这种说法感到太惊讶。不过，我确实希望性能差异不会太大。(~ 5 - 10%)

没有一种语言比另一种语言更快，所以正确的答案是否定的。

你真正要问的是“用Fortran编译器X编译的代码是否比用C编译器Y编译的等效代码更快?”这个问题的答案当然取决于您选择哪两个编译器。

人们可能会问的另一个问题是“考虑到在他们的编译器中优化投入了相同的精力，哪个编译器会生成更快的代码?” 这个问题的答案实际上是Fortran。Fortran编译器有一些优势:

Fortran had to compete with Assembly back in the day when some vowed never to use compilers, so it was designed for speed. C was designed to be flexible. Fortran's niche has been number crunching. In this domain code is never fast enough. So there's always been a lot of pressure to keep the language efficient. Most of the research in compiler optimizations is done by people interested in speeding up Fortran number crunching code, so optimizing Fortran code is a much better known problem than optimizing any other compiled language, and new innovations show up in Fortran compilers first. Biggie: C encourages much more pointer use than Fortran. This drasticly increases the potential scope of any data item in a C program, which makes them far harder to optimize. Note that Ada is also way better than C in this realm, and is a much more modern OO Language than the commonly found Fortran77. If you want an OO langauge that can generate faster code than C, this is an option for you. Due again to its number-crunching niche, the customers of Fortran compilers tend to care more about optimization than the customers of C compilers.

然而，没有什么能阻止人们在C编译器的优化上投入大量精力，并使其生成比他们平台的Fortran编译器更好的代码。事实上，C编译器产生的较大销售额使得这种情况非常可行

使用现代标准和编译器，不!

Some of the folks here have suggested that FORTRAN is faster because the compiler doesn't need to worry about aliasing (and hence can make more assumptions during optimisation). However, this has been dealt with in C since the C99 (I think) standard with the inclusion of the restrict keyword. Which basically tells the compiler, that within a give scope, the pointer is not aliased. Furthermore C enables proper pointer arithmetic, where things like aliasing can be very useful in terms of performance and resource allocation. Although I think more recent version of FORTRAN enable the use of "proper" pointers.

对于现代实现，C通用优于FORTRAN(尽管它也非常快)。

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/fortran.html

编辑:

一个公平的批评似乎是，基准测试可能是有偏见的。这里是另一个来源(相对于C)，将结果放在更多的上下文中:

http://julialang.org/benchmarks/

你可以看到C在大多数情况下优于Fortran(再次看到下面的批评也适用于这里);正如其他人所指出的，基准测试是一门不精确的科学，很容易偏袒一种语言而不是其他语言。但它确实说明了Fortran和C语言有相似的性能。

I think the key point in favor of Fortran is that it is a language slightly more suited for expressing vector- and array-based math. The pointer analysis issue pointed out above is real in practice, since portable code cannot really assume that you can tell a compiler something. There is ALWAYS an advantage to expression computaitons in a manner closer to how the domain looks. C does not really have arrays at all, if you look closely, just something that kind of behaves like it. Fortran has real arrawys. Which makes it easier to compile for certain types of algorithms especially for parallel machines.

在运行时系统和调用约定等方面，C语言和现代的Fortran非常相似，很难看出有什么不同。注意，这里的C实际上是基础C: c++是一个完全不同的问题，具有非常不同的性能特征。

Fortran和C之间的速度差异更多的是编译器优化和特定编译器使用的底层数学库的函数。Fortran没有什么固有的特性可以使它比C更快。

不管怎样，一个优秀的程序员可以用任何语言编写Fortran。

This is more than somewhat subjective, because it gets into the quality of compilers and such more than anything else. However, to more directly answer your question, speaking from a language/compiler standpoint there is nothing about Fortran over C that is going to make it inherently faster or better than C. If you are doing heavy math operations, it will come down to the quality of the compiler, the skill of the programmer in each language and the intrinsic math support libraries that support those operations to ultimately determine which is going to be faster for a given implementation.

编辑:@Nils等人提出了一个很好的观点，即C语言中指针使用的差异，以及可能存在的别名，这可能会使C语言中最简单的实现变慢。然而，在C99中有一些方法可以解决这个问题，比如通过编译器优化标志和/或C语言的实际编写方式。这在@Nils的回答和随后的评论中有很好的介绍。