It doesn't exploit (and in fact deliberately evades) Rust's signature memory safety features. The impression from the headline is "Rust is as fast as C now!", but in fact the subset of the language that has been shown to be as fast as C is the subset that is basically
isomorphic to C.
The impression a naive reader might take is that idiomatic/safe/best-practices Rust has now closed the performance gap. But clearly that's not happening here.
