Why C for Codec Implementation?

This blog post explores the author's choice of C over Rust for implementing codecs. While Rust offers a powerful type system and memory safety features, these benefits come at a performance cost in low-level, performance-critical code like codecs. The author argues that C's simplicity and direct control over hardware make it better suited for high-performance codec development. Examples from PAQ8, bzip3, and LZ4 implementations highlight memory management and performance optimization challenges. The author finds low-level optimization easier in C. While Rust's safety is advantageous, the overhead is unacceptable in performance-demanding scenarios.