But that's abstraction that you're actually using. The parent to my comment was implying that the debug symbols are an indication of abstraction that you're pay

But that's abstraction that you're actually using. The parent to my comment was implying that the debug symbols are an indication of abstraction that you're paying for whether you use it or not (in contradiction to the "zero cost abstraction" mantra/motto of C++ and Rust). You're perfectly welcome to just use a raw for loop with numeric indexes in Rust , in which case you wouldn't have those extra function calls for iterators, etc. Likewise, if you implemented an iterator abstraction in C, you'd end up paying a similar cost. So, that's not what the grandparent comment was talking about.