> In the real world, higher level languages have a much better comparison since everyone's C program has their own slow, buggy "standard" library instead of the hyper optimized ones of higher level languages.

In the real world we've pissed away 30 years of hardware improvements primarily through switching to higher level languages. In the real world higher level languages are still not used we're performance counts (like games). In the real world low level languages like c and C++ are still powering our most important and fundamental projects.