You are free to doubt item 3 as much as you like, but reality has already reached the point where runtime optimiziations with profiling and JIT are starting to beat even "carefully crafted" statically-compiled programs. Yes, there's overhead, of course, but there's also overhead in C. Much of the gain from JIT and profiling lies in the fact that you can do heuristic optimiziations such as live inlining that simply can't be done by a static ahead-of-time compiler (which can't prove that those optimiziations are safe). Over the life of a sufficiently long-running process (like a web application, for example), those gains easily outweigh the overhead of the system, and can quite easily beat statically compiled code.