Should I Rust or Should I Go?

It's the easy choice for new projects. And yeah, if/when it's time to optimize later, and the raw performance of V8 ain't enough, you can reach for threads, WASM, or Rust. 10/10 experience.

> Rust is the 14th most used language

I think the author is a bit confused about "most loved" - that means that people who already use it want to keep using it. 14th most used language is great for such a young and not beginner friendly language. It's only 1 place behind Go and that is 3 years older.

Additionally Rust is mainly replacing C/C++ codebases which are generally much older and slower moving than other languages.

> Now imagine being the developer tasked with updating the dependencies of a service that is 31 versions behind... > During the same period, there was 8 Go releases, 7 Node.js releases (but only 2 LTS) and 3 Python releases.

This is obvious nonsense. The stability of a language is not measured by the number of releases. Come on, did this guy really write a successful book about Rust? Is this satire?

> Rust is actually still in the beta phase, with some important features such as async Traits still missing, which brings more churn to the ecosystem.

Really? Is C++ "still in beta" because it doesn't have async?

> The standard library is anemic

Sure that is an issue in C++ where using third party libraries is a huge pain. Doesn't really matter so much when you can just `cargo add regex`.

> async is hard

This is the only vaguely valid point. But on the other hand 90% of the time the solution is simple: don't use async.

Very disappointing article. I was expecting an actual good comparison of the pros and cons. Go does have some notable advantages over Rust - compile time, ease of cross compilation, simplicity, goroutines, built in fuzzing support, arguably better dependency management. Why not talk about them?

If you need to write microservices (especially for control planes where there good concurrency and distributed system patterns needed) - I find Go be a fine combination of performance (GC hit will be there over Rust), ease of deployment, programming model (CSP) - at a slight expense on verbosity (say compared to python and you also get used to this with your patterns).

If you need high perf/low latency/near C (embedded systems level) performance - with a type system assisted memory management - then Rust.

I have found Go's stdlib to be pretty thorough (and the ecosystem to be awesome too). Yes you will always find that set of X things hard to find that others dont care about. But horses for courses.

I have invested in learning both (but I also find learning languages a joy). But if you absolutely only have time for one consider your use case and pick appropriately. Yes you can do Rust for services too but given all this dual asyn model discussion still ongoing and a lot of real world services/control planes in Go there are already good Go patterns you can leverage right away at a much lower learning curve.