That's one of the reasons Pascal is not regarded as a "high-performance language".
That's utter nonsense. In principle Pascal is just as performant as C. Simply depends on the evolution of the compiler, which is still getting better.
The language structures are similar. There are many C compilers that are outperformed by FPC on many platforms.
If you consider C as a high performance generic language, you should also consider Pascal a high performance generic language.
It was possible to compare e.g. the GNU C compiler vs the GNU pascal compiler and they basically rendered the same code speed given the same GNU family version (ca 2005). These shared the same code generator. And that is really comparing like for like. The Delphi compiler generates often faster code than the equivalent C++ compiler by Embarcadero over the versions I used. But these are two different compilers, although from the same stable.
That may also be an indication. Note that FPC only generates optimal code when you really twiddle and fiddle all the options. Can be as much as 200% faster than the default.