In my experience Rust typically makes it a little bit harder to write the most efficient algo actually.

That’s usually ok bc in most code your N is small and compiler optimizations dominate.

Would you be willing to give an example of this?

Not OP, but one example where it is a bit harder to do something in Rust that in C, C++, Zig, etc. is mutability on disjoint slices of an array. Rust offers a few utilities, like chunks_by, split_at, etc. but for certain data structures and algorithms it can be a bit annoying.

It's also worth noting that unsafe Rust != C, and you are still battling these rules. With enough experience you gain an understanding of these patterns and it goes away, and you also have these realy solid tools like Miri for finding undefined behavior, but it can be a bit of a hastle.

Has no one written a python! macro for this use case?

Mutating tree structures tends to be a fiddle (especially if you want parent pointers).

UV also has the distinct advantage in dependency resolution that it didn't have to implement the backwards compatible stuff Pip does, I think Astral blogged on it. If I can find it, I'll edit the link in.

edit wasn't Astral, but here's the blog post I was thinking of. https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html

That said, your point is very much correct, if you watch or read the Jane Street tech talk Astral gave, you can see how they really leveraged Rust for performance like turning Python version identifiers into u64s.