It did in Object Pascal as well - way back in a different life when I hung around a programming channel there was a big argument about C always been faster than Pascal from one of the C devs in there - so we set the challenge as "count instances of several words in a 100MB file" fastest using only language features and the standard library for each (what came out the box).

I beat the C programmer because I "cheated" - I dropped into assembly for parts of it since that was part of the core language to be able to do that, he used whatever string library was shipped with his compiler at the time, he rigged it because Object Pascals standard string functions where notoriously slow (fast enough but much slower than C implementations of the time) - one of my prouder moments and 100% not something I could do now, I've completely forgotten assembly.