I'm surprised people can use Iron at all. I tried really really hard to use it and found the complete lack of documentation (or, worse, outdated blog posts) made it impossible. Is there some magic necronomicon I'm missing?
I had better luck with nickel.rs because it has an examples/ folder with quick recipes of most things you'd want to do.
My experience exactly. Nickel.rs has a fairly good set of clear examples on its website and then some more on Github.
Unfortunately it seems to be a common trend that Rust projects only provide API docs. While that can be useful I find more 'high level' docs much more helpful especially when you're new to the language and/or framework.
We are in the early stages of having an official docs team; one of the things we want to do is figure out how to encourage better ecosystem docs. Towards that end, right now is the first "doc days": https://facility9.com/2016/06/announcing-rust-doc-days/ we'll be focusing on the rust-lang-nursery crates this time, but will focus on the ecosystem ones in the future!
EDIT: Oh, and I've wanted a good way for Cargo to produce additional, non-API docs through a top-level "docs" directory, but haven't found the time to properly implement it yet :/
I've been doing some work on these benchmarks. They appear really slow to me as well; I found the environment really hard to set up, though, so I haven't quite figured out how to identify why they're this way.
So it's important to not compare master to when the benchmark was posted; remember, they do them at a certain time, then work happens. So like, I sent a PR to update Rust from 1.0 to 1.6 at one point, for example.
That said, I don't think that missing out on --release was the issue here, as far as I know, it has always been on.