IMO you can make C as fast or slow as you want it to be. If you write terrible C it's going to be slower than good Haskell.
If you write common C (and by common I mean what you see in well known daemons, kernels, etc) its generally at the very least on par. That's mostly because most of the functions come from libraries that have been optimized, in both cases.
If you write common C (and by common I mean what you see in well known daemons, kernels, etc) its generally at the very least on par. That's mostly because most of the functions come from libraries that have been optimized, in both cases.