I keep seeing single-person hobby projects in C++ bodying e. g. tiktoken which is supposed to be peak performance rust (another recent project I saw was vibta being much faster than songrec).

It seems like at least at a certain project complexity the performance problems from rust are unavoidable. But I guess when people are used to js or python performance it seems fast.

The next wave of AI products may be won on latency and cost rather than benchmarks