Which Programming Language is Better? Rust or Golang?

Should I hire Go developers for my next project or should I switch to Rust? If you are having thoughts along these lines, then you have done the right job by landing on this article. Choosing a good server-side language is crucial if you want to develop a robust and complex application. So, this blog will help you out in making a wise decision.  

1. Simplicity 

• One of the main selling features of Go is its simplicity. While Golang development may take just a few hours or days, Rust development could take several weeks. This has a severe impact on collaborations. 
• Go programs are simple to understand, develop, and administer in big teams. On the other hand, learning Rust is really difficult. To be productive in Rust takes hours or even weeks.
• Furthermore, the version 1.18 of Golang now includes a number of helpful features, such as generics, that were previously absent from the language.

2. Performance 

• Both Golang and Rust are in great demand due to their performance. They offer excellent, high-performance internal tools for handling standard builds and dependencies. Rust consistently outperforms Go in run-time benchmarks. This is  because Rust has excellent control over how threads function and how resources are shared among them.
• Go and Rust both use the same formatting tool. For Rust and Go, respectively, you have rustfmt and gofmt. Your code is automatically formatted to follow the canonical style. 
• Go abstracts away from the complexities of the architecture to aid programmers in concentrating on the current problem. The exact reverse of this is visible in Go.
• Rust is not very suitable for large projects, and complicated tasks. On the other hand, Go, despite having a slower runtime than Rust, outperforms Rust in the category of development and compilation. Rust has slower compilation due to the fact that it carries out a number of checks and optimization. 
• Both of the languages perform the same when it comes to deployment. A developer won’t require an interpreter in order to run the program as they both generate static binary as an output. 

In the meantime, if you are stuck with building microservices or API in Golang, you should hire Go developers from Golang.Company. Over the years, the developers associated with the company have assisted several enterprises in making complex, scalable and high-performing applications. 

3. Concurrency 

• Go has excellent concurrency support. The finest aspects of Golang, in the opinion of the majority of developers, are goroutines and channels. These functionalities, nevertheless, are also available in Rust. And you can access them either by Tokio library or the standard library.
• The concurrency paradigm of Rust is stated to be true or perfect. This indicates that a class of thread safety vulnerabilities are discovered by the compiler during compilation. And this is carried out before the program is run. Developers are able to prevent errors like writing it to the same shared variable again without synchronization, as a consequence of this.
• Basically, goroutines are lightweight threads. These Go objects are scheduled across OS threads and are controlled at runtime. Goroutines can be made quickly and cheaply, and the size of the stack may be changed over time. Developers have the scope to create thousands of goroutines rather than the far more expensive OS threads.
• However, the solution mentioned above has a downside to it. It creates memory and CPU overhead in the Go programming language. This drawback is easily fixed in Rust, as it seeks to eliminate even the minor overheads. 

4. Error Handling 

• The way that mistakes are handled is similar in both programming languages. In addition to the error, Golang functions return a number of values. Rust introduced the specialized type, the enum, which contains two subtypes: error type and result type.
• By unpacking the error message with a question mark (? ), error handling is seen to be less verbose in Rust than in Golang. The handling is thorough and neat for both languages.
• These methods assist developers in finding functions where the error is not correctly handled. As a result, developing code in Go and Rust is quite elementary and safe.

5. Security and Memory Safety 

• In Rust, there are several tasks that have to be completed by the developers in order to guarantee the security of the code. This is due to the language’s novel ownership features, which guarantee memory safety at the moment of compilation. There is absolutely no chance of unsafe memory passing through the Rust compiler. To ensure zero lapses in memory safety, Rust presents a multitude of concurrency models.
• Go, however, is not memory secure. Non-atomic multiword structs in Go are used to implement slices and interfaces. In addition to this, data races result in incorrect values, which can cause memory damage.
• However, Go is very secure when it comes to managing use-after-free and dangling pointers, just as Rust. To reduce the problems caused by memory leaks, Go makes use of an automated garbage collector. On the other hand, Rust’s ownership and borrowing mechanisms are fantastic. This concept suggests that every object has an owner who has the power to lend it out to someone else.
• Rust is a better choice than Golang when you are comparing performance. Rust takes care of frequent memory issues without the need for a garbage collector. Rust also enables the creation of various immutable references or the changeable references.

6. Community 

• The Golang programming language made it to the scene in 2009, while Rust came 4 years later in 2013. This makes it more mature, and Go’s simplicity makes the language all the more attractive. 
• The libraries and frameworks of Go have undergone further development than in the case of Rust. This is true for web development applications. 
• But the developers in the Rust community are extremely cooperative and they make sure that they support each other in times of distress. Being an open-source language, Rust is subject to a wide range of changes, bug fixes and development. 

7. Career Opportunities 

• The last factor that you need to think about is the possibility of a career. If being employed is your aim, you should focus on the market with the greatest employment opportunities. It is quite hard to find a decent job for Rust in the market at this moment. However, there are many employment opportunities available in Golang.
• You will find that most of the major companies are using Golang like Google, Uber, Twitch, SendGrid, Dailymotion, Soundcloud, etc. Nevertheless, there are a few companies out there that are relying on Rust such as Brave (Github), Atlassian, Discord, Amazon, etc. 
• A Rust developer roughly makes $120,000 per year. Golang developers get an average yearly income of around $135,000.

Although Rust has the upperhand in many of the above-mentioned parameters, it all boils down to your requirements. If your aim is web development, and distributable servers, then you should choose Golang. Else, if you wish to work on CLI applications, you should go for Rust, due to the libraries, string processing facilities, etc. But you must remember that Rust is one of the most difficult languages in order to get started.