Interesting! I guess that's from your standard benchmark setup. Please note that Fil-C makes no secret of having a performance penalty. It's definitely a pre-1.0 toolchain and only recently starting to pick up some momentum. The author is eager to keep improving it, and seems to think that there's still plenty of low hanging and medium hanging fruit to pick.

It does (or did, at some point) pass the thorough SQLite test suite, so at least it's probably correct! The famous SQLite test coverage and general proven quality might make SQLite itself less interesting to harden, but in order to run less comprehensively verified software that links with SQLite, we have to build SQLite with Fil-C too.