It's both. It's fast enough to provide an alternative to C and C++ purely due to its performance, even ignoring that it's more enjoyable to write Rust than C an

It's both. It's fast enough to provide an alternative to C and C++ purely due to its performance, even ignoring that it's more enjoyable to write Rust than C and C++, and ignoring that Rust code is reliable. That's why Discord switched from Go to Rust for performance reasons, and why there are Python developers that replaced C with Rust for high-performance Python extension modules.