Would C be faster?

No, not measurably, for this site. The pages are already compiled at build time into finished bytes (HTML, brotli and gzip copies, ETags), and serving them is a map lookup. What's left per request is the network stack and HTTP handling, and in Bun those are already native code. Measured below on the same machine and core.

The measurement

bash bench/native.sh: the portfolio's built pages, each server pinned to one core, wrk on the other three (64 connections, 10 s, Accept-Encoding: br, gzip). Same security headers on every response. 2026-10-26, 4-vCPU Linux VM.

The ceiling on this core is the empty response (return 200 "ok", no file, no headers): nginx 97,469 req/s, Bun.serve 101,575 req/s. Half the time per request goes to the kernel's TCP stack, which no server language changes.

What the numbers say:

• Speed: a tie. nginx (C, the fastest common static server) is within ±10% of optz on every page, and the difference changes sign between runs. Run-to-run noise is about 5–10%.
• Bytes: optz sends less. It serves brotli (1,495 bytes for /), nginx here only gzip (1,859). For a visitor on a phone, fewer bytes matter more than server microseconds.
• Memory: C wins. 4 MB for the nginx worker against ~45 MB for Bun. On the 2 GB VPS that's irrelevant today (the Rust engine's connections are what need memory), but it's the one real advantage.
• The compiled executable is the same speed as optz start. --compile embeds the Bun runtime with your code; it changes how you deploy (one file, nothing to install), not how fast it runs.

Where native code does pay off

• The social feed is already native: the Rust engine on raw io_uring and SQLite (portfolio/engine), because that's per-request work with real computation and a database. See MEASUREMENTS.md.
• Dynamic page rendering (React rendering per request) is the one part of the site where JavaScript is the cost. optz keeps it off the hot path instead: pages are static or client-rendered, dynamic ones are streamed and cached, and features.dynamic: false keeps the renderer from even loading.
• TLS and HTTP/2/3: put nginx (or a CDN) in front. optz nginx generates that config, and it serves /assets/ from disk with nginx, which is where its 4 MB footprint helps.

What compiling to C would cost

Rewriting the site in C (or generating C from React components) would give up hot reload, islands, typed routes and APIs, Server Actions and the rest of the framework, add memory-safety risk to code that parses untrusted input, and make every change slower to write. All for a throughput the C server above doesn't actually beat. The engine shows where it's worth it.