> wouldn't it be possible for SAFE Rust code to be faster than C code considering that the Rust compiler has much more syntax to play around and optimize? Yes.

> wouldn't it be possible for SAFE Rust code to be faster than C code considering that the Rust compiler has much more syntax to play around and optimize? Yes. Rust has TONS of aliasing info that optimizers essentially spend a lot of time recovering in other programs. However, LLVM doesn't support being told about all of it, and doesn't make use of it that much directly (we can at best tell LLVM that a whole bunch of things are `restrict`). In fact, we had to stop doing this for `&mut` because LLVM had too many bugs around that. C/C++ codebases don't benefit from this as much so LLVM doesn't prioritize this. Rust can do optimizations at the MIR level and I'm hoping we'll do more in that space in the future.