We've implemented network drivers in C and Rust and did a performance comparison. Interestingly, the C-to-Rust-transpiled code ended up being faster than the original C implementation: https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages/blob/master/R...
Looks like you're compiling C code with -O2. Does Rust build set -O3 on clang? Did you try -O3 with C? I know it's not guaranteed to be faster, just curious.
https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/profiles.html#rele...