This Golang vs. Rust article will discuss two open-source, most popular and efficient programming languages Golang and Rust. Both languages provide high-performance and efficient hardware capacity, making them considerable for various projects by the developers. These similarities have made both languages popular to work with. The question arises which language to choose and why. In this article, you will see the comparison between Golang and Rust on different parameters and then decide with these facts.
What Is Golang?
Golang is an open-source programming language launched by Google back in 2009. The Go programming language was born to carry away all the excess baggage found in languages such as C++. It comes with goroutines, strong security, and some standard libraries. Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson designed a procedural, compiled, and statically typed language to reduce the complexity of managing the infrastructure and codebases within Google.
What Is Rust?
Rust is a multiparadigm, general-purpose and high-level programming language. Graydon Hoare introduced it along with Dave Herman, Brendan Eich, and others at Mozilla Research. Rust is focused on safety, stability, performance and safe concurrency. It got its 1.0 version on May 15, 2015. In a Stack Overflow Developer Survey, developers voted Rust as the most loved programming language by developers since 2016.
Comparison Between Golang and Rust
The parameters we’ll be looking for Golang vs. Rust are:
- Performance
- Concurrency
- Memory Management and Security
- Developer Experience
- Development Speed
Now, we will start with the Golang vs. Rust Comparison.
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Performance
Go and Rust are both compiled languages and they directly translate the code to executable machine code. Both languages produce efficient code.
Many big MNCs use Rust to boost speed, whereas Go is famous for reducing the number of responsible servers to almost a tenth of the original capacity. Rust has the upper hand in delivering output over Go due to its great runtime speed, but it lacks compilation time.
On the other hand, Go is better in compilation time but lacks runtime speed.
Let's do a comparison of the two from a concurrency perspective.
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Concurrency
Go was designed to use CPUs efficiently and handle multiple tasks simultaneously. The purpose was accomplished with the introduction of goroutines. These are lightweight, call fewer resources, and are executed independently. These features allow Go to work with a high number of goroutines without affecting performance. That is, they run concurrently with other functions. These have eliminated the need to create new threads.
On the other hand, Rust was recently introduced with the native syntax in the form of async/await and guarantees memory stability. Therefore, developers prefer to work with Go in the case of concurrency.
Now, move ahead and compare these two languages based on Memory Management and Security now.
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Memory Management and Security
With different approaches, Go and Rust practice safe access and memory management, making them the choice for cloud computing. Security vulnerability increases when you access memory unsafely. Go offers various paradigms such as memory allocation and automatic garbage collection to handle possible vulnerabilities and bugs. Go gets automated during the run time and it allows developers not to bother assigning or removing memory.
On the other hand, Rust ensures no memory leakage during the compile time. Moreover, the code won't be compiled until it's memory safe, which requires developers to be attentive and be aware of memory allocation.
Now, get on to Developer’s Experience between Golang vs. Rust.
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Developer Experience
Rust comes with a much steeper learning curve than Go. While Go is relatively easier than Rust, it has a steeper learning curve than other languages like JavaScript and Python. Go was designed with a relatively simpler syntax than Rust and was adopted as an easier alternative to C++ compromising memory allocation and memory safety, but comes with concurrency.
On the other hand, Rust offers high memory safety features and passing pointers make the codes more complex.
Now it’s time to get to the next point of comparison: Development Speed.
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Development Speed
Development speed is far more crucial than performance; that is how quickest it is to write software with the language than to run it. Go, with its simplicity, sets some benchmarks by quicker build speed than a range of languages in the market. But, it has to sacrifice its runtime performance for it.
On the other hand, Rust's memory safety feature compromises compilation time. And its features take time to understand, making the developer compensate with both compilation and development time.
When to Use Go:
Most languages support concurrent programming, whereas Go is especially well-designed for the purpose. Go has a different range of project types. Go best fits for server-side applications, backend web development, databases, and network programming as its goroutines can handle many concurrent, independent requests.
It also provides official support for the Google Cloud Platform, making it viable for cloud computing. Go is a great substitute for Node.js to generate web APIs. Go also provides built-in HTTP (HyperText Markup Language) web protocol support, allowing developers to develop APIs and run it as a microservice.
You should Choose Go If:
- You prefer code simplicity.
- You favor easy syntax and straightforward code.
- You work with large amounts of concurring data.
- You prefer good execution speed.
When to Use Rust:
Rust is perfect for managing machine resources for better performance when processing vast data and other CPU-intensive operations such as executing algorithms. Rust possesses excellent memory safety features guaranteeing bugs detection but slows down the compilation speed to an extent.
It's not a disadvantage; rather, it guarantees that developers won't encounter any memory safety bugs, as the compiler compiles and checks every data pointer. Developers who prefer faster runtime will prefer Rust anytime.
You Should Choose Rust If:
- You prefer Algorithm execution
- You choose runtime speed over compilation speed
- You prefer to work with memory safe feature
- You don't get bothered with expanded development time
- You prefer hardware-level code
Conclusion
Go and Rust share a considerable amount of similarities. They both are recently introduced languages with built-in memory safety and concurrency. Both are fantastic languages and target different use cases. Whether you should go with Rust or Go for your project solely depends on the project's needs and requirements. In the above section of Golang vs. Rust, we have discussed both the language's use cases and differences. I hope the article should help you make your choice.
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