The operations themselves may only impose a performance hit of 10% or less, but the optimizations that those checks inhibit can easily cascade into a 2x slowdown, which isn&#x27;t acceptable if Rust wants to compete with C++.<p>As for your correlation, I care a lot about safety, but I also recognize that the safest language in the world isn&#x27;t going to pose any real-world improvement if it&#x27;s not capable of competing with less-safe languages in their entrenched domains.