Amazon posts article on Rust, Go tech lead: don’t “pull the plug” on us

Recently, the “Sustainability with Rust” article was published on the official Amazon blog, illustrating through research and comparison that Rust outperforms other languages in terms of sustainability. The article was subsequently covered by ZDNet. Following the ZDNet story, Go technical lead Russ Cox sent out 14 tweets saying that the article was seriously misleading about the Go language.

The story raised a lot of eyebrows and sparked a big “Rust or Go” debate. So, what happened?

The “controversy” caused by an article

At Amazon, Rust has become key to building infrastructure at scale. in 2019, Amazon became a sponsor of the Rust project. in 2020, it began recruiting Rust maintainers and contributors and joined forces with Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla to form the Rust Foundation.

Controversy 1: Studies from several years ago are biased

In the published “Sustainability with Rust” article, data from a 2017 study was used to demonstrate that Rust is an energy-efficient programming language. The study focused on testing 10 benchmark problems on 27 programming languages and measuring execution time, energy consumption, and peak memory usage. Here is the first part of the article that caused controversy：

There was a very interesting study a few years ago that focused on exploring the relationship…