OP here: I think you're reading too much into the title. It's not about the failure of Rust. It's about where I stepped in with some custom optimizations for better performance. If you read the blog post, the solution implemented is very Rust-y as well. It uses a newtype with custom methods to try and make the code as nice and readable as possible.

FWIW this post was very well received on the Rust subreddit. They loved it and it got over 350 upvotes, so that community definitely didn't receive it as some sort of attack on Rust.

'Enum' is ill-defined so the addition of Rust is significant as it indicates what one can expect with how data is structured. There is nothing in that speaks to the Rust compiler or Rust being inefficient or anything of the sort. It remains unclear where this idea is coming from. There is nothing in title that would send you there.

Unless, again, the title was edited at some point?

If you replaced it with Zig, the situation changes.