Yes, rust has a runtime. Even most assemblers have runtimes these days. Take a look at this: https://imgur.com/lPOPj1G https://imgur.com/lPOPj1G You see that

Yes, rust has a runtime. Even most assemblers have runtimes these days. Take a look at this: https://imgur.com/lPOPj1G https://imgur.com/lPOPj1G You see that difference? That's not rust producing less-efficient code. That's the more complex rust runtime. Think it's an artifact of static linkage? Guess again. https://imgur.com/KsrApXC https://imgur.com/KsrApXC But IIRC rust doesn't statically link glibc by default. So the difference in runtime overhead is more than 10x the machine code size. That doesn't translate to a 10x slowdown and a lot of that is probably baked-in optimization but rust certainly has a runtime and associated overhead and it has a lot larger runtime than C.