> If they rewrote it in C++ again, they would have most likely got the same result because they got a chance to fix a design that might not have been most optimal.

This speculation has been offered every time. It's not crazy to think this might be true, but it's also not crazy to think that if C++ keeps leaving performance on the table and Rust doesn't that adds up for real projects.

When Titus wrote "ABI: Now or Never" in 2020 he estimated 5-10% aggregate loss. Things that you could fix, if you started over, but C++ refuses to do that because of ABI and so it doesn't have these fixes, whereas in most cases† Rust does. So I can well believe that a blow-for-blow port could get you 10% perf win.

† One of the examples Titus cites is the "Small String Optimization". Rust deliberately doesn't do SSO for its standard library collection String, but several really nice SSO optimised types are available, including ColdString and CompactString, which are way better than what's provided in C++ if that's what you need.

I think the difference in languages that allows for faster performance is that Rust does a good job of surfacing expensive operations and it makes defensive programming less of a requirement.