How is Rust or any other language supposed to help with this? Unless there is a serious design problem in the current go codebase, removing GC overhead will not by itself solve the problem of some software having to run all the time
Our initial research indicates the thing that needs the most attention isn't the DHT (a commonly-cited source of slowness), but the data transfer protocol: bitswap. We plan to tackle that in the coming months.
Do i think Rust could have a better, more generic library with code that is far more concise than Go? Yes.. but that's not likely the cause for ipfs-go's issues.
I can definitely see a chance for a rewrite producing better code though. As much as i'd love to give Rust that victory, i just can't imagine Rust is _that_ big of contributor in this specific case.
We are going to experiment with such improvements, and try to work with protocol labs to standardise them if/when we come up with a good solution.