The thing is, Rust allows you to casually code things that are fast. A few years back I took part in an "all programming languages allowed" competition on a pop

The thing is, Rust allows you to casually code things that are fast. A few years back I took part in an "all programming languages allowed" competition on a popular hacker blog in my country. The topic was who writes the fastest tokenizer (a thing splitting sentences into words). I took 15 minutes to write one in Rust (a language I had just learned by that point) using a "that should work" approach and became second place, with some high effort C-implementations being slower and a highly optimized assembler variant taking first place. Since then I programmed a lot more in C and C++ as well (for other reasons) and got more experience. Rust is not automatically faster, but the defaults and std library of Rust is so well put together that a common-sense approach will outperform most C code without even trying – and it does so while having typesafety and memory safety. This is not nothing in my book and still extremely impressive. The best thing about learning Rust however was how much I learned for all the other languages. Because what you learn there is not just how to use Rust, but how to program well. Understanding the way the Rust borrow checker works 1000% helped me avoiding nasty bugs in C/C++ by realizing that I violatr ownership rules (e.g. by having multiple writers)