Go language vs Rust language: For The Future

Go and Rust are two of the most popular programming languages today. Both languages have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, so it can be difficult to decide which one is better for a particular project. In this article, we will compare Go and Rust in terms of performance, ease of use, and other features to help you make an informed decision.

Performance 🔗

Go is a compiled language that is designed for speed and efficiency. It has a simple syntax that makes it easy to read and write code quickly. Go also has excellent garbage collection capabilities, which helps reduce memory usage and improve performance.

On the other hand, Rust is a compiled language that focuses on safety and security. It has powerful memory management features that make it difficult to introduce bugs into your code. Rust also has excellent concurrency support (using crates like tokio), which allows you to write code that can take advantage of multiple cores or processors at once (parallel execution).

Greptime published an article about optimizing Rust’s Protobuf decoding performance. It discusses finding ways to reduce the time it takes to parse Protobuf data written in Prometheus format. The authors compare the performance of Rust to Go. They find that Rust is slower than Go. They investigate why this is the case and implement several optimizations. These optimizations include using pooling techniques and making use of unsafe operations. Overall, the authors are able to significantly improve the performance of Rust’s Protobuf decoding. However, they note that Rust’s focus on memory safety can make it difficult to achieve the same level of performance as Go. Yet, at the end of optimization journey, Go is faster and more efficient in that case.

According to computer language benchmarks game , Rust is faster and more efficient than Go. But in practical cases like the Protobuf decoding, Go is faster and performance better than heavily-optimized Rust code.

I personally consider Go faster than Rust because you can write an efficient performant code in Go easily compared to written in Rust with its complex syntax and memory management and fighting the borrow-checker and the long-time compiling while iterating/developing. You can say skill issues if you want.

Ease of Use 🔗

Go is designed with simplicity in mind, making it easy for beginners to learn the language quickly. Its syntax is straightforward and intuitive, making it easy to read and understand code written by others.

On the other hand, Rust can be more challenging for beginners due to its complex type system and strict rules about memory management and fighting the borrow-checker. However, once you understand the basics of Rust’s type system, writing code in Rust becomes much easier.

Features 🔗

Go comes with a standard library that provides basic functionality such as networking support, file I/O operations, string manipulation functions, etc. It also supports third-party libraries for more advanced tasks such as web development or machine learning applications.

On the other hand, Rust comes with an extensive standard library as well as powerful third-party libraries for various tasks such as web development or game development.

Using generative AI models 🔗

The help you can get from LLMs (large language models) and generative AI in case of Go is much better and more accurate.

The challenging syntax and fighting the borrow-checker is making it harder for LLMs/AI to generate a working Rust code despite being a popular language with huge talkative community.

Go is much easier to understand and generate by LLMs / AI models thanks to Go’s simplicity in syntax and features, and the large productive community.

CLI apps usage statistics 🔗

I created gobrew app to count how many apps distributed via Homebrew written in a specific language.

I logged the statistics of apps count in a separate post about comparing Go & Rust usage in the real world .

Here is the table of counts until August 1st 2024.

As you can see, Go is used more for creating CLI apps. Rust still growing but can’t reach the number of apps built in Go language.

Conclusion 🔗

Both Go and Rust are powerful programming languages with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Go is great for projects that require speed and efficiency while Rust is better suited for projects that require safety and security features such as device driver development.

Ultimately, the choice between Go vs Rust depends on your specific needs and requirements for your project. I hope I made it easier to decide.

I personally will choose Go every time as my technical domains are far from operating system level of needed security.

PS: If your project deals too much with strings, use Go instead of Rust. It is a nighmare in Rust.