The D programming language

Lisp (DSL):

map [I Arg]~>say."Args[$I] = '$Arg'" enum.Args

D:

foreach (i, arg; args) Stdout("args[")(i)("] = '")(arg)("'").newline();

any question?

>>3
No, the advantage of languages like C, C++, and maybe Go, is that they allow truly manual memory management (while malloc/free are considered semi-automatic). You can store any object as a field of another object, or as a local variable, or in a special allocation pool.

This produces significant steady improvements in performance across the entire program, compared to the situation where each object has to be allocated on the heap. You get reduced memory pressure, much better locality, fewer indirections, and all that synergizes and accumulates.

Your idea of optimizations as being primarily about "bit-twiddling" was outdated 30 years ago, sorry.