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 of all, it is 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
However:
Go is an open-source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software — golang.org
In this article, I will try to briefly outline in which scenarios Go is the ideal choice and in which scenarios Rust might be a better option.
2. Similarities
What are the common goals of both languages?
2.1 Memory Safety
Historically, one of the biggest causes of software bugs and security vulnerabilities has been unsafe or incorrect access to memory.
Rust and Go tackle 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, which means your programs will be compiled directly into executable machine code, allowing you to deploy your program 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
Although both Go and Rust have features associated with functional and object-oriented programming (OOP), they are both pragmatic languages designed to solve problems in the most appropriate way.
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2.5 Suitable for Scalable Development
Rust and Go both have useful features that make them suitable for large-scale programming, whether in large teams, large codebases, or both.
For example, both Rust and Go use standard code formatting tools (Go’s gofmt, Rust’s rustfmt), which puts an end to pointless debates about brace placement.
Both also have excellent built-in high-performance standard build and dependency management tools; no need to struggle with complex third-party build systems or learn a new system every few years.
3. Differences
While Rust and Go have many similarities, in certain areas, rational individuals may 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 fast 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 relieves some burdens from programmers, making it easier to focus on solving the main problems rather than the details of memory management.
In fields where execution speed outweighs all other considerations (such as 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, 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 time spans or teams that need to quickly onboard a large number of new programmers, especially when they are relatively inexperienced.
3.3 Features
On the other hand, Rust has almost all the features you can imagine in a programming language, along with some features you might not even imagine. This makes it a powerful and expressive language that can accomplish the same task in various ways.
If you are transitioning from other languages to Rust, you can likely find Rust equivalents for most features you are used to. 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, such as web servers and microservices.
3.5 Safety
Rust is carefully designed to ensure that programmers cannot do unsafe things they do not want to do, such as overriding shared variables. The compiler requires you to be explicit about how data is shared between different parts of the program and can detect many common errors and bugs.
Therefore, the so-called “fighting with the borrow checker” is a common complaint of new Rust programmers. Implementing programs in safe Rust code often means fundamentally rethinking their design, which can be frustrating, but when reliability is your top priority, the benefits 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 presence of a clearly defined standard style means that any Go programmer can relatively quickly read and understand a new codebase.
When it comes to large software development, clarity beats cleverness. For large organizations, especially many distributed teams, Go is a good choice. Its fast build times also benefit rapid testing and deployment.
4. Trade-offs
The design teams of Rust and Go 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 (like Go) allow for quick and easy development of reliable, efficient programs, which is the most important thing for some people.
However, garbage collection can lead to unpredictable runtime behavior due to its performance overhead and stop-the-world pauses, and some find this inconsistency unacceptable.
Languages that require programmers to explicitly manage every byte of memory allocation and release (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 possibly more portable. But for many programs, access to hardware and precise control over how the program executes is more important.
Rust aims to bring programmers “closer to the metal” with more control, while Go abstracts away architectural details to bring programmers closer to the problem.
4.3 Speed
Rust 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 the program to build or waiting for the program to run.
4.4 Correctness
Both Go and Rust are designed to help you write correct programs, but in different ways: for example, Go provides excellent built-in unit testing frameworks 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: you can only learn one of them. In fact, the more languages you understand, the more valuable you become as a software developer.
Every new language you learn gives you new ways 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 programmers.
When you use the language that suits you best, you become the most proficient, and you also enjoy the most fun that programming brings you. So, if the question is, “Should I learn Rust or Go?” the only correct answer is, “Yes.”
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