> Is C++ more performant than C? I find this hard to believe.

At the compiler level, no. But as you write projects, you will for instance run into things you can do with templates which are infeasible to attempt with macros.

One example might be qsort() - a C compiler _could_ catch cases where it could create an intrinsic qsort based on the data type and function pointer being passed. However, in C++ you have the facilities to create a type safe, genericized sort that will be inlined based on the data structure.