Rust's zero cost abstractions mainly stem from its affine ownership model managing memory lifetimes safely and correctly with zero cost - as that is the killer

Rust's zero cost abstractions mainly stem from its affine ownership model managing memory lifetimes safely and correctly with zero cost - as that is the killer feature... That's what I do. When people think of "zero cost" they don't think about std::optional. They think about not having to manage memory lifetimes AND NOT having to pay for a Garbage Collector to do it for you. That was always the trade you made until Rust. I add on some cost to locks to prevent deadlock, and some cost to loops to insert co-operative yields in concurrent contexts unless you turn it off.