&quot;No, because it&#x27;s possible to implement efficient hash tables with C&#x27;s primitives -- in fact that&#x27;s how hash tables in essentially ALL languages ARE implemented.&quot;<p>Because each architecture has a C compiler that&#x27;s been highly optimized. Popularity plus money invested. That&#x27;s it. If you were right, we&#x27;d see optimizations coded in C even when alternative, optimizing compilers were available. I got a one-word counter to that interestingly enough from &quot;high-performance computing&quot; field: FORTRAN. Free Pascal people are doing fine in performance and low-level code as well despite little to no investment in them.<p>Seems throwing money at a turd (eg FORTRAN, C) can get a lot of people&#x27;s hands on it despite some of us shuddering and saying &quot;Get that pile of crap away from me!&quot;