Lots of languages ARE faster than C, including older languages than C, like Fortran and Forth.<p>Being faster than C is not anything special in itself.<p>Most things being equal (typed, optimized, compiled, no runtime etc) C is mostly faster when it does something with a lower overhead than some other language (e.g. a specially written hashmap algorithm targeted to some program vs C++ std map type), not because of its primitives being faster.