> There's simply a much lower bar to writing fast (and unsafe) C.
That's kind of my point, writing a faster PNG decoder in C may be easier for you but convincing anyone to actually use it instead of the slower but proven safe-ish libpng would be an uphill battle. Trust in C code is extremely hard-won compared to Rust which uses little if any unsafe. The 'png' crate that Chrome is considering to replace libpng has no unsafe whatsoever and is still faster.
That's kind of my point, writing a faster PNG decoder in C may be easier for you but convincing anyone to actually use it instead of the slower but proven safe-ish libpng would be an uphill battle. Trust in C code is extremely hard-won compared to Rust which uses little if any unsafe. The 'png' crate that Chrome is considering to replace libpng has no unsafe whatsoever and is still faster.