One thing that isn't considered is that these "benchmarks" are a rat race to the bottom in code quality. You can't blame the author(s) from wanting to win this

One thing that isn't considered is that these "benchmarks" are a rat race to the bottom in code quality. You can't blame the author(s) from wanting to win this fictitious wall of fame. I don't know why exact numbers like "6.9987 million/sec" exist. There should be a saner way to run benchmarks, which in turn creates sanity among developers. This viewpoint is, of course, unrelated to the community discussion here. I mean other languages have unsafe (or c's void *), but they don't appear to fight about it. I don't mean to say anything bad about Rust. But it seems to attract people who want the absolute best performance at any cost. IMHO. May be I am wrong. That may be something Rust people can try to change??