I've suspected for a long time that Rust would prove to be a faster language than C++ once it was done, but only as the code scales up. On a line-by-line basis, the two languages are comparable, so microbenchmarks will never show it, but Rust will tend to very, very strongly encourage better architectures that require you to do less copying just to be safe. It's really hard to measure "architectural affordances", though... heck, it's hard to even define them, let alone benchmark them.

OpenSSL has been optimized extensively, so I consider the fact that any hobbyist project with a fraction of the resources able to beat it by that much to be significant in a way that, say, beating "some guy's github json parser" isn't. If I were going to temper my excitement, though, what I'd want is to make sure the Rust implementation isn't unknowingly trading away important security considerations to get that speed, such as whatever constant-time operations may be necessary or guarantees about when the key will be destroyed or whatever. I have no concrete knowledge about that in this specific case, but in a security context it is something I'd want to check in general. OpenSSL has had its stumbles, and the architecture is... debateable, especially when binding to it in a non-C language... but it has also been reviewed a lot, and battle-tested, and a lot of other things this little library just hasn't been yet. (Not because of any deficiency of the library, author, or language, but just, something things can only come from time and scale.)