Yes, in general Rust is faster than C, I would argue, because there are some problems the hinders C performance such as strict aliasing and volatile data simply doesn't exist in Rust, and immutable const propagation and const evaluation works too.

Yes, the same way is that Fortran is faster than C due to stricter aliasing rules.

But in practice C, Rust and Fortran are not really distinguishable on their own in larger projects. In larger projects things like data structures and libraries are going to dominate over slightly different compiler optimizations. This is usually Rust's `std` vs `libc` type stuff or whatever foundational libraries you pull in.

For most practical Rust, C, C++, Fortran and Zig have about the same performance. Then there is a notable jump to things like Go, C# and Java.