Comment by jsheard

> There's simply a much lower bar to writing fast (and unsafe) C.

That's kind of my point, writing a faster PNG decoder in C may be easier for you but convincing anyone to actually use it instead of the slower but proven safe-ish libpng would be an uphill battle. Trust in C code is extremely hard-won compared to Rust which uses little if any unsafe. The 'png' crate that Chrome is considering to replace libpng has no unsafe whatsoever and is still faster.