As someone who has been writing a lot of Rust, I think that's only apparent... there's lots of things you can't do in Rust that you can in a GC-based language.

As someone who has been writing a lot of Rust, I think that's only apparent... there's lots of things you can't do in Rust that you can in a GC-based language. The restrictions Rust imposes on you (mostly about the borrow checker, especially when you have mutable values) makes it much harder to write code... if you make it easier by cloning happily, you might end up with worse performance than in the GC-based language. If you don't, I guarantee your code won't look pretty with all those lifetime annotations.