What to choose Golang or Rust?

Without any further context, this question is unanswerable.

• What industry are you aiming at?
• What tech area (web, back-end, front-end, embedded, AI, IT, statistical analysis)?
• Or is this just for hobby? What hobby? robotics? AI? server deployment?

❌ In many cases, Rust and Go are both poor choices to focus on if you want to enter some specific industry .

Each language has its place in some ecosystems more than others.

📈 E.g. if you're aiming to do statistical analysis in a science/research department, your colleagues will want you to have R and/or Python and likely reject any suggestions of Go or Rust.

🌐 Equally, if you want to work on front-end dev, focusing on JavaScript/TypeScript will be more fruitful.

🛠️ If you're looking for integrating with existing tooling, look at what those tools favour most. If it is neither Go nor Rust, then the observation answers itself.

🤓 If it's for the sake of learning/having fun, or for future proofing, learn either or both . 😄

Note that these days the question of 🦀 Rust vs ⚡ Zig is more frequently popping up than Rust vs 🦫 Go - and for good reason. But what's your reason ? ✅

Go is certainly easier to write, and is a good choice if you like the old C style of doing things, but has some pitfalls that you must be aware of.

Rust has a more strict syntax, is more verbose, but imho it has less pitfalls and can give you a better understanding of the flow of data throughout the code.

Both languages are good, if you want to write backend servers Go will get you there quickly with just the standard library, but with Rust you will need a library like Axum or Actix and a bit of understanding of async.

do you plan doing much async stuff?

• If yes -> choose go
• If no -> choose rust

Here an article that goes into detail why async rust sucks
bitbashing.io/async-rust.html

example, you are writing x:

• embedded code -> rust
• internet of things -> rust
• system programming -> rust
• web server without calling other async endpints -> rust
• web server calling many other async endpoints -> go

please further note

• rust -> ist about 2x times faster to execute/run code (no gc)
• go -> is about 2x times faster to write code (general web server)

Its about your personal values, what do you value more?

• Writing the fastest possible and most efficient software (and bragging about it proudly on the internet)
• or getting to a solution as fast as possible (and having more free time or getting more things done)

Go and Rust are similar in the way that Python and JavaScript are similar. Try out the both languages, and see for yourself.

I suppose that you are a novice developer, so I assume that Go would fit better since it has been made to be easy as python, but as powerful as C++ (iirc)

Try go and rust on codewars and you find it which one is fit for you. My vote is : rust.

I would definitely recommend GO to anyone who want to learn a new language, and their main area of focus is not web page development (you have no choice, go for Javascript). Go should suffice for most of the use cases... Use Rust if performance or security is the most important criteria for your personal or enterprise projects. And Rust's steep (I mean really steep) learning curve makes it not for everyone... Though I personally love Rust more compared to GO, but I tend to use GO more compared to Rust... How irony... 😅😅😅

Choosing Golang would be a very practical choice.

In general, projects where Go's GC is a major obstacle tend to choose Rust.
I recommend Rust because some of its concepts are quite interesting.

Go for concurrency or if you plan on working with cloud native technologies since many CNCF and other cloud tools are written in Go (ie. kubernetes, prometheus, argocd, docker, dagger).