[littlestymaar]

> I think this shows that Zig isn't a slow language despite its relative youth

Which shouldn't surprise anyone since the heavy lifting is done by LLVM and zig doesn't attempt to add too much semantics on top of it. (For the same reason I don't think benchmarking unsafe Rust makes much sense either)

[estebank]

It makes sense to benchmark unsafe Rust against safe Rust, both for the same algorithm without changes as well as alternative architectures to get around the constraints of the borrow checker and type system. I would go as far as saying that if you want to use unsafe this should be a precondition. It happens too often that someone reaches for unsafe first "for performance wins" that then aren't manifested in practice.

[nine_k]

The compiler might make unfortunate decisions which no optimization can fix. E.g. the amount of pointer chasing may affect things a lot. Mutability and aliasing influence drastically which optimizations LLVM would be allowed to make, also stack vs heap allocation for short-lived objects, etc.