Rust and Go in 2024

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, security, features, scalability, and concurrency? What do they have in common and what are their fundamental differences? Let’s find the answer through a friendly and fair comparison of Rust and Go.

1. Rust and Go are both great

Firstly, it is very important to note that Go and Rust are both absolutely excellent programming languages. They are modern, powerful, widely adopted, and provide excellent performance.

Rust is a low-level statically typed multi-paradigm programming language that focuses 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 which scenarios I think Go is the ideal choice and which scenarios Rust may be a better choice.

2. Similarities

What is the common goal of the two languages?

2.1 Memory safety

Historically, one of the biggest causes of software errors and security bugs is unsafe or incorrect access to memory.

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