Tldr; they’re about even. Which is what I’d expect given they’re both performance oriented languages which compile via llvm.

As I see it, performance wise Rust has one advantage and one disadvantage compared to zig. Rust’s advantage is that it can add the equivalent of C’s noalias all over the place because of the rules imposed by the borrow checker. This can help the optimizer. And the drawback of rust is that all array accesses are bounds checked. (Well, at least in safe rust). But thanks to prediction intrinsics, the slow down from this is much less than I always expect. Bounds checks do bloat the binary size though.

So rust and zig trading blows benchmark to benchmark is about what I would expect to happen. And that’s exactly what I’m seeing here.