Zero-Cost Abstractions in Rust — What It Really Means

“What you don’t use, you don’t pay for. And what you do use, you couldn’t hand-code better.” — Bjarne Stroustrup The Philosophy at the Core When Bjarne Stroustrup coined the term zero-cost abstractions for C++, he meant two things: You don’t pay for what you don’t use You can’t do better by hand Rust takes that philosophy and turns it into a guarantee, not just an aspiration. It’s baked into the design of the language itself. But what does that actually mean in practice? M