I think it's a common problem with almost all, if not all, languages that come to us out of the 1990s that they are fundamentally built on the presumption that "someday" compilers may save us. Well, "someday" is pretty much here, and they've all failed, as far as I'm concerned. (If you're happy with 10x-slower-than-C and substantial memory eaten to get even that fast, YMMV, but it's not what was hoped for. No sarcasm on that, BTW; sometimes that's suitable, just like sometimes 50x-slower-than-C is suitable. But it's not what was hoped for.)

Haskell can do some pretty tricks with specific code if you tickle it right, but if you just write general, normal code, it's faster than Python (a low bar, Python qua Python is nearly the slowest language in anything like common use) but not a generally "fast" language. "Someday" is here; if it's not "generally C-fast" today, I see no particular reason to believe it will be in the future either, especially since GHC seems to have spent a great deal of its design budget.

It would be interesting to see someone's take on Haskell, but where they write the language from the very beginning to be a high-performance language. There's probably multiple points in this design space that would be possible. Arguably Rust is nearly one of them, and getting even closer in the next few years.