Now commenting beyond my expertise, I understand both ecosystems have developed orthogonally, C#/Java assumes code to be higher level and "dumb" and optimization are in library/CLR/JVM. While C/C++ are developed with code at lower level and developer making sure code is optimized.

Now, I could be talking out of ass, haven't done enough C/C++ coding in over a decade.

You can write poorly optimized C#.

And the intel C++ compiler has provided significant performance for decades via optimization without needing to optimize by hand.

I'm not the person you are replying too, but I believe that of course, the pattern holds if you keep shifting it down. I.E. using a faster CPU will speed up all programs running on it, each (already optimized) ASIC has to be optimized further individually.

I don’t think so, because it is the runtime JIT (Just-In-Time) optimizer that is the critical speed advantage that allows the CLR and JVM to beat C and C++.

The inlining of virtual calls is the critical optimization that enables this. Because C/C++ is optimized statically and never at runtime, it is unable to optimize results of function pointer lookups (in C, and thus also virtual calls in C++). However, the JITs can inline through function pointer lookups.

In sufficiently complex programs, where polymorphism is used (i.e. old code that calls new code without knowing about it), this yields an unsurpassed speed advantage. Polymorphism is critical to managing complexity as an application evolves (even the Linux kernel, written in C, uses polymorphism, e.g. see struct file_operations).