[lmm]

> Do huge swaths of Rust users value vanishingly small performance gains over memory safety, in a language that prides itself on being able to provide speed and safety?

I mean, yeah, probably? It was meant to appeal to people who were still writing things in C/C++, who are by definition people with those values. For general-purpose use the language was always "OCaml but with vanishingly small performance gains".