I don't think I agree. A debug build of Rust code is often like 40x slower or so than a release build. Those optimizations make a huge difference. Binaryen can only do a fraction of them, so I wouldn't expect AssemblyScript to get close to Rust and C++ (and the benchmarks show that too).

> does AssemblyScript allow the same control over memory layout as C, C++ or Rust?

There's no UB, so in a way AssemblyScript is almost more low level than those, as you have full control over the memory and instructions.