Programming languages have gained a lot of popularity in the past decade out of which Rust and Go are two popular languages that are widely used by developers. These programming languages perfectly align with the aim of developing secure frameworks and apps that favour microservices. Rust was developed by Mozilla and first appeared in 2010 while Go was introduced in 2009 by Google. Various organisations embraced Go, and it has 93% of the market share, and as Rust entered late, it is only adopted by 19% of the firms. Rust got a great hike in recent years as its usage rose to 75% from 67% (in 2017). Go was reported to be the fastest-growing language on GitHub in Q2 of 2018, and it has grown 7% overall with a 1.5% change as compared to the previous Quarter.
Rust Programming Language
Rust made its entrance into the programming world in 2010 as one of the machine learning languages. This language was focused on enhancing the security, performance, parallelism, and modularity of the existing frameworks. It offers a lot of useful features that has gained it a lot of popularity amongst the developers, and it’s preferred by them over other programming languages.
Pros of Rust Programming Language
This programming language offers a wide range of benefits and advantages to the programming world. Some of the fascinating features of the language are:
1. It has an amazing run speed.
2. It enables fine-grain features like rich patterns, allows syntax extensions, and novel embeddings.
3. Rust is easily interoperable with C, and FFI, amongst various others.
4. It has a zero-cost abstraction.
5. The language offers a predictable runtime behaviour.
6. It reduces the chances of crashing and saves debugging time.
Cons of Rust Programming Language
Just like a coin has two sides to it, everything in existence has both pros and cons associated with it. Major drawbacks of the Rust programming language are:
1. The process of learning Rust is steeper as compared to Go.
2. Rust is quite slow to compile in comparison with Go.
3. Also, in analogous conditions, it is slower than the C and C++ language.
When to choose Rust Programming Language?
Rust has a number of applications, but it all depends on your project. It is an ideal choice if you want to implement a concurrent system with high performance and low resource footprint. In such cases, interpreter-based languages tend to perform poorly and might disappoint you but Rust won’t. Rust would be a good pick if:
1. Performance is a necessity.
2. You want Rust to interoperate with C language.
3. You need full control over every detail of how the threads behave and how to rectify the errors etc.
Go Programming Language
This language was introduced by the tech giant, Google in 2009 with the purpose of solving the issues faced by organisations across the globe while developing a software infrastructure. It offered features like garbage collection, built-in concurrency, dependency management, and robustness across multiple boundaries between the components with several others. It was a well-thought approach behind launching the Go programming language which is why it’s always a few steps ahead in the competition between Rust and Go, i.e. Rust vs Go or Go vs Rust.
Pros of Go Programming Language
As we mentioned that Go stays up in the competition with Rust, these are the features that help it in the same:
1. One of the best features of this programming language is the incredibly high speed at which it compiles to machine code.
2. It offers the simplicity of code.
3. The language is efficient, concise, and pragmatic.
4. It is quite flexible and has high concurrency.
5. Go facilitates the developers with strong interoperability with C language.
Cons of Go Programming Language
Go undoubtedly is a good programming language, but there are some disadvantages that come along with the benefits of the programming language. They are:
1. It maintains way too simplicity over performance.
2. Go lacks the generics to an extent.
3. The language doesn’t have enough immutability.
4. It is not a system language.
When to choose Go Programming Language?
It would be an ideal decision to choose Go in the following conditions for your programming needs:
1. If one of your top priorities is good readability.
2. For writing the codes faster and save time.
3. If you want to maintain an overall uniformity and simplicity.
Go vs Rust: What both have in common
There are a lot of differences between Rust and Go, which makes them different from each other. But there are some similarities too. For instance,
1. Both the programming languages are pretty mature and open-source.
2. They both follow a micro service-oriented approach.
3. Both of them are modern and support parallel computing environments.
Rust vs Go: Comparison at a glance
· Speed: Go offers simplicity and directness, which makes it faster than Rust. While on the other hand, Rust has a lot more features than Go which is why its speed is slow, including the compiling speed.
· Concurrency Model: Rust recently gained the native concurrency syntax in the form of async/.await, but it lacks the developer experience, which is not the case in Go as it is backed up by a strong developer experience for concurrency.
· Performance: It is one of the factors that work in favour of Rust in the battle or Rust vs Go. Rust programs run at speed similar to C and C++ the runtime speed is lower in Go. The development speed of Go falls a few steps behind the high performance offered by Rust.
· Security: Go is more focused on reducing the complexity and provides flexibility while Rust is more concerned about preventing security flaws. For delivering the results promised by Rust, developers need to modify their workflow and move in and out of the system programming.
· Memory Management: For memory management through zero-cost abstraction, Rust uses compile-time ownership strategy while in Go, it is handled automatically during the runtime allowing the users not to worry about releasing or allocating the memory while writing code.
As we can see that both Rust and Go have their pros and cons, you can switch between them as per your requirements. For example, if you need ease-of-use and quick development, you should choose Go or if your primary concern is performance, go for Rust.
