I can answer that question, as both the author of Pijul and as someone most Rust zealots usually don't like very much.
Nothing magical in Rust, at the time it was the only language that worked seamlessly on Windows and Linux, and made it easy to manipulate on-disk datastructures, which is what makes Pijul fast. The new take on version control that Pijul brings can be roughly described as seeing "files with conflicts" as a CRDT. It was therefore crucial to be able to manipulate complicated datastructure without loading anything, and Rust seemed to let us do that without having to do C++ and spend our time debugging allocation issues in our tricky algorithms, while never being really confident that we were done.
The library I wrote for this, called Sanakirja, is actually faster than the fastest C equivalent, but this isn't because "Rust is magical", far from it.
Nothing magical in Rust, at the time it was the only language that worked seamlessly on Windows and Linux, and made it easy to manipulate on-disk datastructures, which is what makes Pijul fast. The new take on version control that Pijul brings can be roughly described as seeing "files with conflicts" as a CRDT. It was therefore crucial to be able to manipulate complicated datastructure without loading anything, and Rust seemed to let us do that without having to do C++ and spend our time debugging allocation issues in our tricky algorithms, while never being really confident that we were done.
The library I wrote for this, called Sanakirja, is actually faster than the fastest C equivalent, but this isn't because "Rust is magical", far from it.