> The best thing here for Rust would be to achieve the best performance on this game and nothing else.

That's absurd. The benchmarks game doesn't measure real-world performance in any sense whatsoever. And many of the implementations are written in ways that you'd never ever put into production code (for example, the laughably bad hashing functions that are mentioned elsewhere in this thread). From what I understand, the Rust implementations tend to not get up to those shenanigans, which makes them appear worse than the implementations from other languages that do.

It's not the goal of a programming language to be the top on a silly benchmarks game. The goal is to be an excellent language for real-world use.