Give it some time to mature. Today is the day of the language specification, not the finalization of the toolchain.
The Rust language offers low-level access with amazing security guarantees, and is working on an optimizing toolchain.
Let me take Python as a comparison. It has fundamental[1] roadblocks for being fast on current and probably future hardware, because its dynamic nature requires many indirections which are problematic for CPU cache efficiency.
Will Rust always be faster than C? Probably not, but that is not needed to be blazingly fast. What is important is that there are no fundamental difficulties to be as fast as C.
[1] I know, you can work around some of those indirections.
If you consider that robust and memory efficient parallelization is way more easily achieved in Rust than in C, Rust might already win today for some applications if you limit the developer time. In C it's hard to fulfill the requirements at all.
Humbly suggest the "optimizing performance hasn't been a focus, shipping good language semantics has been" message needs to be repeated louder and clearer.
The expectation that has been created is - "Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast" - and that may lead to disappointment.
imo it would be helpful to you all, to set a clear expectation that performance will be a priority in some future version but has not been so far. (As that's what you seem to have just said.)
That's all. No reference to "a particular benchmark", or whatever you take "generally fast" to mean.
http://www.areweblazingfastyet.org is free - you'd better grab it before I do :). If you don't take it, I'll just make it return those pieces of the language shootout.
The Rust language offers low-level access with amazing security guarantees, and is working on an optimizing toolchain.
Let me take Python as a comparison. It has fundamental[1] roadblocks for being fast on current and probably future hardware, because its dynamic nature requires many indirections which are problematic for CPU cache efficiency.
Will Rust always be faster than C? Probably not, but that is not needed to be blazingly fast. What is important is that there are no fundamental difficulties to be as fast as C.
[1] I know, you can work around some of those indirections.