Eh, doubtful. Sure, it'll be faster than unoptimized C. But when you observe strict aliasing rules in C a modern compiler will generally produce similar quality assembly for both languages. The reason BLAS is so fast is that every single line of code in a hot loop has been hand-optimized and tons of CPU-specific optimizations exist

Fortran yields some of the fastest code out of the box, yes, but C/C++ can yield equivalent performance by adhering to certain basic rules.

Even with strict aliasing, the only way C/C++ standard effectively lets one type to be cast to another is incurring a copy. Tell me what can be done better for performance in C that can't be done in Fortran or "another static language without pointer indirection".

That's mostly because of Fortran doesn't have the same aliasing trouble as C?

Pointer indirection is expensive tradeoff for flexibility