I agree Rust lowers the bar to write low-level performant code (especially considering that it was always harder to write correct C than, say, correct Ada) but

I agree Rust lowers the bar to write low-level performant code (especially considering that it was always harder to write correct C than, say, correct Ada) but I don't think it's always necessary to write code in non-garbage-collected for decent performance. We just need to use garbage collected programming languages that are statically typed, don't rely on a runtime on the host computer (e.g. the JVM), are memory safe and have predictable performance characteristics. All I can think of are Swift, OCaml, and Standard ML. In Go, your program causes a segmentation violation if it dereferences a null pointer, so I won't call it completely memory-safe, but it's still an improvement in abstraction compared to C while still providing performance.