David Lattimore, author of the Wild linker, writes about Rust performance, compilation speed, and supply chain security.
HN commenters link it for how Wild was made fast and for Rust performance tricks, and one questions the buffer reuse workaround.
> Want it fast? Turn off the runtime checks by calling unsafe code.
You can do that for sure, but you can also sometimes write your code in a different way. https://davidlattimore.github.io/posts/2025/09/02/rustforge-wild-performance-tricks.html is an interesting collection of these.
> it doesn't read like the author has spent weeks in a profiler combing over machine code to optimize Rust code
It is true that this blog post was not intended to be a comprehensive comparison of the ways in which Rust and C differ in performance. It was meant to be a higher level discussion on the nature of the question itself, using a few examples to try and draw out interesting aspects of that comparison.
I recently saw a post about Cackle [1] coming out of the rust ecosystem which looks pretty cool. Similar to what others have said, there's always a chance that a C lib or shell script is leveraged to bypass compile time guarantees. I think that's why it's important to do both. Do what you can to keep your supply chain safe and limit your runtime as much as possible.
[1] https://davidlattimore.github.io/making-supply-chain-attacks-harder.html
Idk. Did you see the "Buffer reuse" section of this blog post? [1]
Kudos to that guy for solving the puzzle, but I really don't want to use a special trick to get the compiler to let me reuse a buffer in a for loop.
[1]: https://davidlattimore.github.io/posts/2025/09/02/rustforge-wild-performance-tricks.html
Rust supports dynamic linking btw.
https://robert.kra.hn/posts/2022-09-09-speeding-up-incremental-rust-compilation-with-dylibs/ https://davidlattimore.github.io/posts/2024/08/27/rust-dylib-rabbit-holes.html
Looks like he's been continuing to work on it.
GitHub repo: https://github.com/davidlattimore/wild
List of his blog posts, a couple of which are about wild: https://davidlattimore.github.io/
I found this hypothetical story to explain a supply chain attack easy to understand:
https://davidlattimore.github.io/making-supply-chain-attacks-harder.html#a-hypothetical-story-about-alex