Perhaps smitherfield actually was talking about the overall relative performance of "Rust [programs] on that Benchmarks Game site".

To say something about whether Rust-the-language-implementation was building faster executables wouldn't we compare the same Rust programs built with different Rust versions (not compare Rust programs against Java or C++ programs).

Match-up measurements of the same programs, from the 1st June 2015 and 1st June 2016 data files, like this:

    elapsed secs	program id
    4.013 => 3.780	binarytrees #1
    15.449 => 16.650	fannkuchredux #2
    5.204 => 5.588	fasta #1
    0.070 => 0.067	meteor #1
    0.050 => 0.044	meteor #2
    24.630 => 24.068	nbody #1
    1.733 => 1.743	pidigits #1
    436.686 => 288.131	threadring #1

:and then note that the measurements were made on different OS versions, probably with different LLVM versions.