I think a lot of Rust users would argue they don’t even care much about performance. They just enjoy all of the correctness guarantees the compiler can enforce, as well as how ergonomic the language can feel. Being able to deploy a single static binary, and having an easy to use build tool and package manager are significant bonuses as well. Rust makes really hard problems easier when you know the compiler has your back.

Rust gives you the tools to write very high performance code, but it doesn’t have to be about that.

I’ve had to point out to people quite a few times that garbage collectors can improve performance… especially compared to naive implementations of manual memory management. GCs are not just a tool for lazy programmers. GCs can make allocation incredibly fast, and you get to defer cleanup work to another thread(s), which means less work in the critical path. Removing work from the critical path is how you make software faster. Every tool has tradeoffs, and GCs are a tool. GCs often use more memory as a tradeoff.

I like Rust well enough, but I do wish we had a language that combined the ergonomics of Rust with the dead simple concurrency model of Go/Erlang. I haven’t tried it, but Luantic looks promising: https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/lunatic

As it is, we’re fortunate to have quite a few great languages and platforms these days.