There has been a zlib in Ada for many years, doing its job quietly. Speed comparable to the C version, probably not beating it, but not trailing by much in any case. Rust is safer than C but less safe than Ada from what I can tell.

Rust looks to me to be about halfway between C and C++, using implicit move semantics ("borrowing") more than C++ does, and the notorious borrow checker is simply the compiler making sure you don't make RAII mistakes because of that.

It's always seemed to me that Phoronix is too often about turning mailing list drama into clickbait. I've mostly disliked it, because of that.