Rust vs Go: A Comparison for 2024

This article is translated from “Rust vs Go in 2024”^[1].

What can I say without making everyone angry?

Which is better, Rust or Go? Which language should you choose for your next project, and why? How do they compare in terms of performance, simplicity, safety, features, scalability, and concurrency? What are their similarities and fundamental differences? Let’s find the answers through a friendly and fair comparison of Rust and Go.

1. Both Rust and Go Are Great

First and foremost, it’s very important to note that both Go and Rust are absolutely excellent programming languages. They are modern, powerful, widely adopted, and provide outstanding performance.

Rust is a low-level, statically typed, multi-paradigm programming language focused on safety and performance — Gints Dreimanis^[2]

However:

Go is an open-source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software — golang.org^[3]

In this article, I will try to briefly outline the scenarios where I think Go is the ideal choice and where Rust might be the better option.

2. Similarities

What are the common goals of the two languages?

2.1 Memory Safety

Historically, one of the biggest causes of software bugs and security vulnerabilities has been unsafe or incorrect memory access.

Rust and Go handle this issue in different ways, but both aim to be smarter and safer in memory management than other languages.

2.2 Fast, Compact Executables

Both are compiled languages, meaning your programs will be directly compiled into executable machine code, allowing you to deploy them as a single binary file. This also gives Rust and Go programs extremely fast execution speeds compared to interpreted languages like Python or Ruby.

2.3 General-Purpose Languages

Rust and Go are both powerful, scalable general-purpose programming languages that you can use to develop a variety of modern software. Both have excellent standard libraries and thriving third-party ecosystems, along with strong commercial support and large user bases.

2.4 Pragmatic Programming Style

While both Go and Rust have features associated with functional and object-oriented programming (OOP), they are both pragmatic languages aimed at solving problems in the most appropriate way.

2.5 Scalability

Both Rust and Go have some useful features that make them suitable for large-scale programming, whether for large teams, large codebases, or both.

For example, Rust and Go both use standard code formatting tools (Go’s gofmt and Rust’s rustfmt), which ends the useless debates about bracket placement.

Both also have excellent built-in high-performance standard build and dependency management tools; no more wrestling with complex third-party build systems or learning a new system every few years.

3. Differences

While Rust and Go have many similarities, in certain areas, a rational person might prefer one language over the other to meet specific project needs.

3.1 Performance

Both Go and Rust are very fast. However, Go’s design favors rapid compilation, while Rust is optimized for fast execution.

Rust’s runtime performance is also more consistent because it does not use a garbage collection mechanism. On the other hand, Go’s garbage collector alleviates some of the burdens on programmers, making it easier to focus on solving primary problems rather than the details of memory management.

In areas where execution speed outweighs all other considerations (e.g., game programming, operating system kernels, web browser components, and real-time control systems), Rust is the better choice.

3.2 Simplicity

By design, Go is a small language: it has very few syntax elements, keywords, and language structures. You can quickly learn the basics of Go and use the language to enhance productivity.

This gives Go an advantage in projects with short timelines or teams that need to onboard a large number of new programmers quickly, especially when they are relatively inexperienced.

3.3 Features

On the other hand, Rust has almost every feature you can imagine in a programming language, along with some you might not have thought of. This makes it a powerful and expressive language that can accomplish the same task in multiple ways.

If you are transitioning to Rust from other languages, you will likely find most of the features you are accustomed to have Rust equivalents. This gives Rust an advantage when large projects need to migrate from traditional languages like C++ or Java.

3.4 Concurrency

Unlike most languages, Go’s design has built-in support for concurrent programming, such as goroutines (lightweight versions of threads) and channels (a safe and efficient way to communicate data between concurrent tasks).

These make Go a perfect choice for large-scale concurrent applications like web servers and microservices.

3.5 Safety

Rust is carefully designed to ensure that programmers cannot do unsafe things they don’t want to do, such as overriding shared variables. The compiler requires you to specify how data is shared between different parts of the program, and it can detect many common errors and bugs.

As a result, the so-called “fighting with the borrow checker” is a common complaint among new Rust programmers. Implementing a program in safe Rust code often means fundamentally rethinking its design, which can be frustrating, but the benefits of doing so when reliability is your top priority are worth it.

3.6 Scalability

Go is designed to make it easy to scale projects and development teams. Its minimalist design brings a degree of consistency, and the existence of a clearly defined standard style means any Go programmer can relatively quickly read and understand new codebases.

When it comes to large software development, clarity trumps cleverness. For large organizations, especially those with many distributed teams, Go is a good choice. Its fast build times also facilitate rapid testing and deployment.

4. Trade-offs

The design teams of Rust and Go have made some distinctly different choices, so let’s look at some areas where these trade-offs make these two languages fundamentally different from each other.

4.1 Garbage Collection

Generally, languages with garbage collection and automatic memory management features (like Go) can quickly and easily develop reliable, efficient programs, which is most important for some.

However, garbage collection can lead to unpredictable runtime behavior due to its performance overhead and stop-the-world pauses, which some find unacceptable.

Languages where programmers must explicitly manage the allocation and release of every byte of memory (like Rust) are better suited for real-time or ultra-high-performance applications.

4.2 Abstraction

The history of computer programming is a story of increasingly complex abstractions that allow programmers to solve problems without worrying too much about how the underlying machine actually works.

This makes programs easier to write and potentially more portable. But for many programs, having access to hardware and precise control over how a program executes is more important.

Rust aims to bring programmers “closer to the metal,” giving them more control, while Go abstracts architectural details, bringing programmers closer to the problem.

4.3 Speed

Rust has made many design trade-offs to achieve optimal execution speed. In contrast, Go cares more about simplicity and is willing to sacrifice some (runtime) performance for it.

At this point, whether you prefer Rust or Go depends on whether you are willing to spend more time waiting for your program to build or run.

4.4 Correctness

Both Go and Rust aim to help you write correct programs, but in different ways: for example, Go provides an excellent built-in unit testing framework and a rich standard library, while Rust focuses on eliminating runtime errors through its borrow checking mechanism.

Fairly speaking, writing a given program in Go is easier, but the result may be more prone to errors than the Rust version. Rust imposes discipline on programmers, while Go allows programmers to choose the level of discipline they want to apply to a specific project.

5. Conclusion

I hope this article convinces you that both Rust and Go are worth serious consideration. You should reject the false dilemma that you can only learn one of them. In fact, the more languages you know, the more valuable you become as a software developer.

Every new language you learn offers a new way to think about problems, which can only be a good thing. The most important factor in the quality and success of any software project is not the choice of language, but the skills of the programmer.

When you use the language that suits you best, you become the most proficient, and you will also enjoy the most joy that programming brings you. So if the question is “Should I learn Rust or Go?” the only correct answer is “Yes.”

— John Arundel

Gopher Tribe Knowledge Planet^[4] will continue to strive to create a high-quality platform for learning and communication about the Go language in 2024. We will continue to provide high-quality first-release Go technical articles and reading experiences. At the same time, we will strengthen the sharing of code quality and best practices, including how to write concise, readable, and testable Go code. Moreover, we will enhance communication and interaction among star friends. Everyone is welcome to ask questions, share insights, and discuss technology. I will respond and communicate as soon as possible. I sincerely hope that Gopher Tribe can become a harbor for everyone to learn, progress, and communicate. Let’s gather in Gopher Tribe and enjoy the joy of coding! Everyone is welcome to join!

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