This already happens a bunch, even with the current setups. It's very natural if you come from a compiled language, and not if you don't. The first step of someone saying "hey why is Rust slow?" is five people replying "did you use --release".
I had a graph traversal program written in Python. I ported it to Rust, and the runtime was identical -- 68.4 seconds, down to the tenth of a second. (Kinda blew my mind -- I had to triple check that I was running and timing what I thought I was!) I had a bit of a crisis of faith.
I poked at it a few times over the next week, then finally got on the IRC channel and quickly received the advice mentioned above. Same input, with --release: 6.2 seconds.
