alt Hacker News> then logically being closer to bare metal would help with performance
Once you move beyond interpreters, performance is mostly a property of how much effort you want to put into profiling and optimization, not any specific properties of a programming language (YMMV of course).
I agree, but certainly language constraints or features make analysis easier (and some analysis which was previously impossible now suddenly is) which in turn unlocks/enables a whole world of optimisations the compiler can do for you!