(1) is a one-time investment and allows you to take advantage of compiler guarantees. (2) is what every other language does for FFI anyways. In Rust, you could

(1) is a one-time investment and allows you to take advantage of compiler guarantees. (2) is what every other language does for FFI anyways. In Rust, you could have a lightweight wrapper around the C API, but you would lose out on some benefits. OP said performance was critical, so why would they use a GC language?