Don't get me wrong there's a lot of room for speed in programs we use regularly, but I make two observations:
1. Speed is usually found by by people have worked on
existing tools in the space, and they don't often make
that much of a song and dance about it beyond that
theirs is faster.
2. Speed is found in the minds of people not in their
tools. When you get past a certain amount of native-
ness, you get optimizations by knowing more or having
a brilliant insight into the problem rather than using
a new meme-language. It might be necessary for certain
types of programming but it's not sufficient.
Basically I don't like weird meme based marketing of tech. I'm a grumpy old man already and I'm the ripe old age of 20
You were the one that cynically asked if the advertised performance improvements were real or imaginary, not me.
To your point, many of the improvements from Rust-based tools appears to come from the ability to express performant semantics safely and elegantly in the language. You could write an equivalent in C, but the Rust one comes naturally, can be expressed at a higher level with better abstractions, and often comes out with top-tier performance before even investing in microoptimizarions (as long as the Big-O performance is in check).
