I don't think that's true at all. The goal here was to make it as fast as rust (which basically compiles down to 'straight' native code by default). Haskell, wh

I don't think that's true at all. The goal here was to make it as fast as rust (which basically compiles down to 'straight' native code by default). Haskell, while also compiled, kind of runs on a virtual machine (the STG). It should be expected that a language with a different execution model will need some work to fit another one. Of course, one would expect the same work if you were trying to make rust run as fast as Haskell on a processor designed to execute STG expressions (of which there are none, but there could be, like the lisp machines of the past). Either way, optimization in any language often requires annotations. The main benefit of Haskell though is still equational reasoning, which this does not obviate. You can get rid of all the annotations and your code will still run, be correct, and can be reasoned about