“Holding up an order of magnitude more applications … clearly it has upsides”.
It’s holding up lots of applications because better languages didn’t exist at the time those projects were started, and it’s rarely feasible to switch languages. Specifically, a lot of people look to Rust to unseat C++ for new applications, but it will take a while for Rust to mature with respect to libraries (e.g., game engines) and mindshare in those industries. But even then, old languages have tons of staying power by virtue of age.
I'm not super familiar with Rust, do you have SSE/AVX intrinsics (others?)? Can you write assembly embedded in Rust code? How does rust stack in terms of performance?
Rust's std::simd is the portable abstraction but it is so far only available in nightly Rust, in principle you would be able to write code that does SIMD on whatever hardware (ARM, x86-64, whatever) is targeted including AVX.
Yes, Rust has inline assembly in roughly the same way you'd be used to with C or C++
The Benchmarks Game has a bunch of benchmarks, and while it's probably significant that the Python programs are routinely orders of magnitude slower than say C, we likely shouldn't read too much into whether somebody scraped a few more milliseconds off the best time for one of the benchmarks listed.
Portable abstractions for SIMD aren't very useful, because if you're writing SIMD you want performance, and the things it abstracts over (specific SIMD capabilities and weird performance quirks of different instructions) mean the results of using it aren't predictable.
It’s holding up lots of applications because better languages didn’t exist at the time those projects were started, and it’s rarely feasible to switch languages. Specifically, a lot of people look to Rust to unseat C++ for new applications, but it will take a while for Rust to mature with respect to libraries (e.g., game engines) and mindshare in those industries. But even then, old languages have tons of staying power by virtue of age.