The linked implementation assumes mostly ASCII. It doesn't use SIMD. SIMD in Rust is a work in progress - the next version (1.27) will stabilize x86-64-specific SIMD intrinsics. There's an rfc (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2366) for portable SIMD types.

simd support in Rust was only recently accepted and is being implemented so it currently relies on the vectorisation abilities on the compiler (it might get revisited soon-ish I guess).

As for the assumption of mostly-ascii, the validation function has a "striding" fast path for ascii which checks 2 words at a time (so 128 bits per iteration on 64b platforms) until it finds a non-ascii byte: https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/core/str/mod.rs.html#1541