@Jason
Depends on the loop. In .NET 2.0 the foreach loop variations (C# and VB) were notoriously slow, whereas your standard for and while loops are almost identical in speed to their C/C++ counterparts. This has changed in 3.0 from my understanding.
While managed languages do have a roughly 7% speed difference (depending on the benchmark and what's being tested) this won't matter for most people. I do understand that this may be an issue when using the DarkGDK as it's fairly slow even when using native code. The DarkGDK is very easy to use and learn, however it isn't very fast.
I've coded everything from games to emulation code in .NET. I'm even working on a new HPC (High Performance Computing, think clusters or grid computing) system, written in .NET. Is there a speed difference? Yes. Is it significant? No, not unless you're working on hard real-time systems (Games are not hard real-time systems. Think medical equipment.)
@Zuka
Not quite true. Where did most of the older professional programmers get their beginnings? Punchcards, ASM, Cobol and most importantly, Fortran. BASIC is a VERY new language comparatively. BASIC was created for those who did not have any training in computer science. It was not intended for professionals.
Having taught programming for a short while, I'd never teach beginning programmers BASIC. It teaches bad habits such as bad structuring which leads to spaghetti code (goto is not evil if used as intended, this just never happened). It also makes learning other third generation languages that much more difficult due to the way the language is used (both syntactically and conceptually).
I have no issue with people liking or using BASIC languages, it most definitely has it's place. TGC targets this place quite well with it's DarkBasic language. It's not intended for computer science majors, but for hobbyists.
Don't get angry when people talk badly about BASIC. It was an excellent idea that came at a tremendous price. The job market became flooded with so called "programmers" who only had skill in BASIC languages but had no useful experience in the real world. Getting jobs became harder and getting work done became far more difficult due to inexperienced staff. There's a reason many people scoff at BASIC languages.
Just keep it in mind.
-Piro