What is rust-vs-zero?

Rust vs Zero is a local benchmark suite for comparing equivalent programs written in two programming languages: Rust and Zero. The goal is to give you a quick, hands-on comparison of how these two languages perform on your own machine, with your own compiler versions and hardware, rather than trusting published numbers from someone else's setup. The tool compiles matching programs in both languages, runs each executable multiple times, validates that the output is correct, and records several measurements: how long the compiler took to build the program, called build time, the median and fastest runtime across multiple runs, and the size of the compiled executable both before and after compression. Results are saved to a JSON file and displayed in a local static web interface you open in a browser. The benchmark cases currently cover five scenarios: a minimal startup program, an integer arithmetic loop, a branch-heavy loop with lots of if or else decisions, a memory workload involving copying and updating a fixed array, and a byte-level parser that classifies characters as digits, letters, or other. You run it from the command line using Node.js. It requires Rust's compiler, rustc, and the Zero compiler to both be installed. The number of runtime samples per benchmark is configurable. A smoke-check mode runs each benchmark just once for a fast sanity check. The project notes that these are local microbenchmarks and not definitive statements about either language's overall performance, since results vary by CPU load, compiler version, and benchmark design. It is intentionally lightweight and straightforward to clone and run yourself.