Yep. A few years ago I implemented a skip list based rope library in C[1], and after learning rust I eventually ported it over[2]. The rust implementation was

Yep. A few years ago I implemented a skip list based rope library in C[1], and after learning rust I eventually ported it over[2]. The rust implementation was much less code than the C version. It generated a bigger assembly but it ran 20% faster or so. (I don't know why it ran faster than the C version - this was before the noalias analysis was turned on in the compiler). Its now about 3x faster than C, thanks to some use of clever layered data structures. I could implement those optimizations in C, but I find rust easier to work with. C has advantages, but performance is a bad reason to choose C over rust. In my experience, the runtime bounds checks it adds are remarkably cheap from a performance perspective. And its more than offset by the extra optimizations the rust compiler can do thanks to the extra knowledge the compiler has about your program. If my experience is anything to go by, naively porting C programs to rust would result in faster code a lot of the time. And I find it easier to optimize rust code compared to C code, thanks to generics and the (excellent) crates ecosystem. If I was optimizing for runtime speed, I'd pick rust over C every time. [1] https://github.com/josephg/librope https://github.com/josephg/librope [2] https://github.com/josephg/jumprope-rs https://github.com/josephg/jumprope-rs