I have heard way too many "performance in the ballpark of C", most of the time it means in some cherry-picked example it is slightly slower than C, and most program is 20-50 times slower.

The language design honestly remind me of the old PHP: uses hashtable and array as primitive data structures, and free memory at the end of a function to achieve memory safety.

It seems quite unbelievable to me that it is gonna have C-like performance, since hashtable is usually quite slow compared to even heap access (direct stack allocation, of course, is the fastest); but I would be happy to be proven wrong.