Yeah, in theory the memory-safe nature of Rust is appealing, but unfortunately it also still seems to come with some unrelated downsides. I'm sure @poVoq@slrpnk.net could go into more detail there :p

It seems that while lemmy could implement similar resource usage improvements, it would otherwise be only slightly faster than Piefed, as it appears that once those other optimizations are made, the main bottleneck on performance is the database itself, and at that point the language the frontend is written in doesn't seem to make much of a practical difference. At least, that's what I've been told.