&gt; We had many people interested in turning off bound checks with compile option, but it was rejected.<p>Can you cite where this happened? This sounds like it was an executive decision, but as I recall the <i>community</i> was opposed to a switch to turn off bounds checks. (Rightly so: the overhead of bounds checks is near zero.)<p>As I recall, there were some people asking for a bounds check switch, but they were mostly people coming from the D community and new to Rust who were asking for a copy of the -noboundscheck switch (without benchmarks to show that it would help). The more interesting option would be something to turn off the lifetime, borrow, and mutability checks. But when I suggested this, almost nobody seemed particularly interested.