Okay, yeah, I should temper that statement. This stuff is super hard to actually study rigorously, and I certainly don't have a reference to support as broad and vague a claim as "tend to perform better."

And of course "perform" is a very muilti-dimentional thing, not a single value.

The truth of the matter is that any generic memory management strategy is going to fall on it's face in certain scenarios; most folks have seen first hand the raii failure mode where some application takes forever just to exit, because it's pointlessly calling god-knows how many destructors.

It's late, and I should generally try to be more clear with myself about what my point is before I post. The thing in there that I think is more salient is, with manual memory management you're opting into control, not magic everything-is-faster-now. I don't think the op was suggesting it, but people often act like using a lower level language is going to always make things faster, ans it just isn't true. Idiomatic, decently performing OCaml is going to make for some very slow Rust.