Well, if I were forced to write in C these days, I would seriously write a C/C++ generator in Lisp to speed the time to market.

But if I could do it where nobody was watching, I would use a different compiled language, Lisp (SBCL) that would get good enough performance and get to market before the manly C/C++ coder.

So on a semi-serious note, why is (apparently) nobody going for the real performance kill, which is to write a framework in hand-coded assembler? Would it be twice as fast as C?