> Even a language like Rust that may have the linguistic features to be blazingly fast will never close that massive gap in historical optimization. Rust will never have an Intel-compiler.
That's most probably false: the current self-hosting implementation have an LLVM backend. So it has back end optimisations covered. As for the front end, Rust's cleaner semantics will make many optimizations easier.
Plus, it's not like the historical gap couldn't be closed by reading the gazillion papers on C++ optimization out there. Copying a known technique is much faster than developing it in the first place.
Maybe Rust will end up slower than C++ anyway, but it won't be the compiler's fault.
That's most probably false: the current self-hosting implementation have an LLVM backend. So it has back end optimisations covered. As for the front end, Rust's cleaner semantics will make many optimizations easier.
Plus, it's not like the historical gap couldn't be closed by reading the gazillion papers on C++ optimization out there. Copying a known technique is much faster than developing it in the first place.
Maybe Rust will end up slower than C++ anyway, but it won't be the compiler's fault.