So what’s my point? What’s any of this got to do with Rust or Go?

Today’s languages are far more advanced than 6502 Assembly, which make it easier to write complex programs. It took a lot of my time to write that game, and I could do it much faster today, with less code than I did back then. But which language today provides that magic combination of simplicity and power?

Well both Rust and Go provide amazing performance. They both compile to machine code, the Holy Grail of performance. And with today’s processing power, developers can do amazing things with either of these languages. So the question is: Should you write you’re next big thing with Rust or with Go?

With a quick search, you can easily find several articles that go into detail about the differences between the two languages. But the focus of this article is the bang for the buck, that magic combination of performance per line of code.

To put it another way, where is that sweet spot of simple code and top-end performance? And in this case, is it Rust, or is it Go?

Let’s tackle performance first, since it’s more objective:

There really isn’t any argument: Rust is faster than Go. In the benchmarks above, Rust was faster, and in some cases, an order of magnitude faster.

But before you run off choosing to write everything in Rust, consider that Go wasn’t that far behind it in many of those benchmarks, and it’s still much faster than the likes of Java, C#, JavaScript, Python and so on. So in other words, it’s almost a wash between Rust and Go on the axis of performance. Now, if what you’re building needs to wring out every last ounce of performance, then by all means, choose Rust. But if what you need is top-of-the-line performance, then you’ll be ahead of the game choosing either of these two languages.