If I'm remembering a DuckDB talk I attended correctly, they chose C++ because they were most confident in their ability to write clear code in it which would be autovectorized by the compilers they were familiar with. Rust in 2019 didn't have a clear high level SIMD story yet and the developers (wisely) did not want to maintain handrolled SIMD code.
Maybe autovectorization works, but can I just write a few ARM64 instructions on my Mac in Rust stable (notcexperimental/nightly) as I can do it in C/C++ by just including a few ARM specific header files?
