Rust is a new language for systems programming, which aims to be friendly to developers. But typically, a language that is friendly to developers can be hard to optimize. In this talk, Yehuda Katz discusses the Rust language, starting by focusing on a compiled extension that was written in Rust, and which required surprisingly little optimization to outperform C. How can this be, and what does it say about Rust?  And how can it help us to understand the differences between dynamic and static languages?