Yes, I think of Rust as a promising target for parser generators. Thinking about text parsing, if Bison generated Rust, then you'd have a memory-safe parser that should be about as efficient as C. Something like this probably already exists or is being worked on. Ideally existing code generators could target Rust also to get memory safety.

There are some SIMD optimizations in parsers though that I don't know how easily you could express in Rust. The quintessential example of this for text parsing is Clang's optimization that uses SSE to skip over C++ comments 16 bytes at a time:

https://github.com/llvm-mirror/clang/blob/61f6bf2c8a8e94c4fa...