zlib-rs is faster than C

I’m sure we can all have a calm, rational discussion about this, so here it goes: zlib-rs, the Rust re-implementation of the zlib library, is now faster than its C counterparts in both decompression and compression.

We’ve released version 0.4.2 of zlib-rs, featuring a number of substantial performance improvements. We are now (to our knowledge) the fastest api-compatible zlib implementation for decompression, and beat the competition in the most important compression cases too.
↫ Folkert de Vries

As someone who isn’t a programmer, looking at all the controversies and fallout around anything related to Rust is both fascinating and worrying. Fascinating because Rust clearly brings a whole slew of improvements over established and older languages, and worrying because the backlash from the establishment has been wildly irrational and bordering on the childish, complete with tamper tantrums and the taking of balls and going home. It shouldn’t surprise me that people get attached to programming languages the same way people get attached to operating systems, but surprisingly, it still does.

If Rust not only provides certain valuable benefits like memory safety, but can also be used to create implementations that are faster than those created in, say, C, it’s really only going to be a matter of time before it simply becomes an untenable position to block Rust from, say, the Linux kernel. Progress has a tendency to find a way, especially the more substantial the benefits get, and as studies show, even only writing new code in memory-safe languages provides substantial benefits. In other words, more and more projects will simply switch over to Rust for new code where it makes sense, whether Rust haters want it or not.

There will be enough non-Rust code to write and maintain, though, so I don’t think people will be out of a job any time soon because they refuse to learn Rust, but to me as an outsider, the Rust hate seems to grow more and more irrational by the day.