"faster than C" almost always boils down to different designs, implementations, algorithms, etc.
Perhaps it is faster than already-existing implementations, sure, but not "faster than C", and it is odd to make such claims.
replies(10):
Perhaps it is faster than already-existing implementations, sure, but not "faster than C", and it is odd to make such claims.
I took 15 minutes to write one in Rust (a language I had just learned by that point) using a "that should work" approach and became second place, with some high effort C-implementations being slower and a highly optimized assembler variant taking first place.
Since then I programmed a lot more in C and C++ as well (for other reasons) and got more experience. Rust is not automatically faster, but the defaults and std library of Rust is so well put together that a common-sense approach will outperform most C code without even trying – and it does so while having typesafety and memory safety. This is not nothing in my book and still extremely impressive.
The best thing about learning Rust however was how much I learned for all the other languages. Because what you learn there is not just how to use Rust, but how to program well. Understanding the way the Rust borrow checker works 1000% helped me avoiding nasty bugs in C/C++ by realizing that I violatr ownership rules (e.g. by having multiple writers)