Rust's Tail-Call Optimization Surpasses Hand-Coded Assembly Performance

A developer's tail-call interpreter implementation using Rust's new become keyword has outperformed both hand-coded ARM64 assembly and previous Rust implementations of the same system. This challenges a long-standing assumption in systems programming: that only assembly-level code can achieve peak performance for specialized workloads like CPU emulation. The result suggests that modern compiler optimizations have matured enough to eliminate the performance penalty of high-level code, potentially changing how developers approach performance-critical applications.