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.
Just trying to dismiss measurements that are publically available, without putting forward something you consider better, is kind-of…