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A lang. benchmark is not going to be very useful in this context. As numerous people have pointed out, you need a benchmark that will simulate more of what you need your code todo in a given project, to see if there's any performance benefit from switching to another lang. This will generally, be different for each project. Not to mention, this is more of a compiler benchmark, then a lang. benchmark, and GCC's claim to fame, is portabilty, not optimization, especially for non-x86 arch's (Sun's Compilers, and SGI's MIPSpro compilers will give you a binary that usually performs about %300-%500 Better than a gcc built binary, since I don't use x86 hardware much, I am not an expert in what compiler you should use to benchmark on that platform, but I would imagine Intel's compiler to be leaps and bounds ahead of gcc in optimization.

Thus the blanket assurtion that C shouldn't be used for speed anymore is wrong, and then adding that the code is less maintainable, is absurd. People have been maintaining C source far longer than most other languages in such wide use (Fortran/etc. the execption, and they still have their place as well). The Best lang is often times, the one the programmer is most familiar with, but C can generally be optimized much better than other languages (C++ included.), although some languages, like fortran, are easier for the compiler to parallize for MP's (take into account SGI's -apo options) for multiple reasons beyond the scope of this comment.