Rust is ideal for this scenario: it lets you use the faster locks / atomics, and the compiler will check everything for you (assuming you can use a standard implementation rather than needing to implement your own - but there are well tested libraries for most common use cases).
It is on my list of things to learn but learning go made me so happy the urgency has decreased. Did they ever finish that rewrite of the core unix cmd line utils from C to Rust? Like find and if config etc. a rust busybox I guess.
In general there has been more effort put into trying to improve on the default tools through projects like ripgrep (grep), bat (cat), lsd and exa (ls), and fd (find) rather than creating drop-in replacements that don't provide all that much over the battle tested originals.
