Building ripgrep did require a lot of experience, indeed, but it had almost nothing to do with Rust. The experience is in text search specifically, which you'll need regardless of the language you're using. If you look at the regex crate for example, there's basically no use of unsafe at all. The only use is to elide bounds checks in some very carefully crafted tight loops. But again, most of that work was done irrespective of Rust and just figuring out the right way to unroll the DFA loop(s).

Optimization tricks in Rust are the same as you'll find in C++. It might be worth you comparing the C++ implementation of Snappy with my Rust implementation, for example. You'll see the same kinds of tricks employed in C++ as in Rust (avoiding memcpy in favor of unaligned loads/stores).