Rust is unique in being both safe and nearly as fast as idiomatic C/C++. This is a key differentiator between Rust and languages that rely on obligate GC or obligate reference counting for safety, including Golang, Swift, Ocaml etc.
it's not clear to me that GC is actually slower than manual memory management (as long as you allow for immutable objects. allocation/free is slow so most high performance programs don't have useless critical path allocations anyway.
For memory there are definitely cases where the GC is faster. This is trivially true.
However, GC loses determinism, so if you have non-memory resources where determinism matters you need the same mechanism anyway, and something like a "defer" statement is a poor substitute for the deterministic destruction in languages which have that.
Determinism can be much more important than peak performance for some problems. When you see people crowing about "lock free" or even "wait free" algorithms, the peak performance on these algorithms is often terrible, but that's not why we want them. They are deterministic, which means we can say definite things about what will happen and not just hand wave.
