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We've had fast languages like C and C++, and then we've had safe languages like Lisp, Java, and Python. The safe languages were all slower. Common wisdom said that a programming language could either be fast or safe, but not both. Rust has thoroughly disproved this, with speeds rivaling C even when writing safe Rust.
What's even more impressive is that Rust achieves safety and speed without using a garbage collector. Garbage collectors can be very useful, but they also tend to waste a lot of memory and/or create CPU spikes during GC collection. But more importantly, GC languages are difficult to embed in other environments.
The big innovation leading to this "fast safety" is the borrow checker.
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The gist of it is: each piece of data has exactly one owner. You can either share the data or mutate it, but never both at the same time. That is, you can either have one single mutating reference to it, OR many non-mutating references to the data.
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https://rerun.io/blog/why-rust