I am far from an expert in this area, but you can do SIMD with Rust: https://github.com/huonw/simd
On x86 with SSE, this could generate a sequence of two instructions: pcmpeqb (do 16 byte-wise compares) followed by pmovmskb (collect the 16 comparison results into a single byte). Then you'd get the same efficiency as what Clang does (Clang searches 8 bytes at a time for a '/' character when skipping over comments).