Rust vs. Go in 2023

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • v

    Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io

  • True, Go has an amazing ecosystem. A great stdlib and libraries.

    That's why we're working on Go2V, which will be able to fully translate Go code to V. (Having a language so similar to Go also helps.)

    It's already been partially used in our translation of Go's crypto modules:

    https://github.com/vlang/v/tree/master/vlib/crypto

  • datafusion-ballista

    Apache Arrow Ballista Distributed Query Engine

  • > Is Rust's compile-time GC about something other than performance somehow?

    AFAIK, memory safety and language features as RAII is also available in C++, for instance. About the reasons for slow compilation, take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/xna9mb/why_are_rust_p...

    Not having a GC is also about not having a runtime as you mention (e.g. nice for creating Python extensions and embedded systems programming) and also more runtime deterministic performance: on that, if I'm not mistaken that was the reason for Discourse switching to Rust and also, e.g.: "the choice of Rust as the main execution language avoids the overhead of GC pauses and results in deterministic processing times" https://github.com/apache/arrow-ballista/blob/main/README.md

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  • Cargo

    The Rust package manager

  • What has worked for me so far:

    https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

    (do the exercises!)

    plus a little bit of:

    https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/

    and

    https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/index.html

    (There's no need to remember the last URL -- just google "rust xxx" and you will get the right page.)

    I'm looking forward to reading this:

    https://nnethercote.github.io/perf-book/introduction.html

    Sprinkle some blog posts on top:

    https://xxchan.me/cs/2023/02/17/optimize-rust-comptime-en.ht...

    https://matklad.github.io/2021/05/31/how-to-test.html

    https://matklad.github.io/2021/08/22/large-rust-workspaces.h...

    https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust

    https://fasterthanli.me/articles/working-with-strings-in-rus...

    ... and the rest is just a matter of applying enough sweat :)

  • book

    The Rust Programming Language

  • What has worked for me so far:

    https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

    (do the exercises!)

    plus a little bit of:

    https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/

    and

    https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/index.html

    (There's no need to remember the last URL -- just google "rust xxx" and you will get the right page.)

    I'm looking forward to reading this:

    https://nnethercote.github.io/perf-book/introduction.html

    Sprinkle some blog posts on top:

    https://xxchan.me/cs/2023/02/17/optimize-rust-comptime-en.ht...

    https://matklad.github.io/2021/05/31/how-to-test.html

    https://matklad.github.io/2021/08/22/large-rust-workspaces.h...

    https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust

    https://fasterthanli.me/articles/working-with-strings-in-rus...

    ... and the rest is just a matter of applying enough sweat :)

  • cyclone

    :cyclone: A brand-new compiler that allows practical application development using R7RS Scheme. We provide modern features and a stable system capable of generating fast native binaries.

  • regex-benchmark

    It's just a simple regex benchmark of different programming languages.

  • * Let you clone a map without rehashing every key to a new seed. I generally measure at least 15x speedup from this alone, unlocking very useful design patterns like "clone a map and apply a few temporary updates for a one-off operation like validation or simulation" with no extra code complexity. Go gives you no better option than slowly rehashing the entire map.

    And that's just hash maps. How about Go's regex engine being one of the slowest in the world while Rust's regex crate being one of the fastest:

    https://github.com/mariomka/regex-benchmark#optimized

  • rebar

    A biased barometer for gauging the relative speed of some regex engines on a curated set of tasks.

  • https://github.com/BurntSushi/rebar#summary-of-search-time-b...

    Further, Go refusing to have macros means that many libraries use reflection instead, which often makes those parts of the Go program perform no better than Python and in some cases worse. Rust can just generate all of that at compile time with macros, and optimize them with LLVM like any other code. Some Go libraries go to enormous lengths to reduce reflection overhead, but that's hard to justify for most things, and hard to maintain even once done. The legendary https://github.com/segmentio/encoding seems to be abandoned now and progress on Go JSON in general seems to have died with https://github.com/go-json-experiment/json .

    Many people claiming their projects are IO-bound are just assuming that's the case because most of the time is spent in their input reader. If they actually measured they'd see it's not even saturating a 100Mbps link, let alone 1-100Gbps, so by definition it is not IO-bound. Even if they didn't need more throughput than that, they still could have put those cycles to better use or at worst saved energy. Isn't that what people like to say about Go vs Python, that Go saves energy? Sure, but it still burns a lot more energy than it would if it had macros.

    Rust can use state-of-the-art memory allocators like mimalloc, while Go is still stuck on an old fork of tcmalloc, and not just tcmalloc in its original C, but transpiled to Go so it optimizes much less than LLVM would optimize it. (Many people benchmarking them forget to even try substitute allocators in Rust, so they're actually underestimating just how much faster Rust is)

    Finally, even Go Generics have failed to improve performance, and in many cases can make it unimaginably worse through -- I kid you not -- global lock contention hidden behind innocent type assertion syntax: https://planetscale.com/blog/generics-can-make-your-go-code-...

    It's not even close. There are many reasons Go is a lot slower than Rust and many of them are likely to remain forever. Most of them have not seen meaningful progress in a decade or more. The GC has improved, which is great, but that's not even a factor on the Rust side.

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  • encoding

    Go package containing implementations of efficient encoding, decoding, and validation APIs.

  • https://github.com/BurntSushi/rebar#summary-of-search-time-b...

    Further, Go refusing to have macros means that many libraries use reflection instead, which often makes those parts of the Go program perform no better than Python and in some cases worse. Rust can just generate all of that at compile time with macros, and optimize them with LLVM like any other code. Some Go libraries go to enormous lengths to reduce reflection overhead, but that's hard to justify for most things, and hard to maintain even once done. The legendary https://github.com/segmentio/encoding seems to be abandoned now and progress on Go JSON in general seems to have died with https://github.com/go-json-experiment/json .

    Many people claiming their projects are IO-bound are just assuming that's the case because most of the time is spent in their input reader. If they actually measured they'd see it's not even saturating a 100Mbps link, let alone 1-100Gbps, so by definition it is not IO-bound. Even if they didn't need more throughput than that, they still could have put those cycles to better use or at worst saved energy. Isn't that what people like to say about Go vs Python, that Go saves energy? Sure, but it still burns a lot more energy than it would if it had macros.

    Rust can use state-of-the-art memory allocators like mimalloc, while Go is still stuck on an old fork of tcmalloc, and not just tcmalloc in its original C, but transpiled to Go so it optimizes much less than LLVM would optimize it. (Many people benchmarking them forget to even try substitute allocators in Rust, so they're actually underestimating just how much faster Rust is)

    Finally, even Go Generics have failed to improve performance, and in many cases can make it unimaginably worse through -- I kid you not -- global lock contention hidden behind innocent type assertion syntax: https://planetscale.com/blog/generics-can-make-your-go-code-...

    It's not even close. There are many reasons Go is a lot slower than Rust and many of them are likely to remain forever. Most of them have not seen meaningful progress in a decade or more. The GC has improved, which is great, but that's not even a factor on the Rust side.

  • json

    Experimental implementation of a proposed v2 encoding/json package (by go-json-experiment)

  • https://github.com/BurntSushi/rebar#summary-of-search-time-b...

    Further, Go refusing to have macros means that many libraries use reflection instead, which often makes those parts of the Go program perform no better than Python and in some cases worse. Rust can just generate all of that at compile time with macros, and optimize them with LLVM like any other code. Some Go libraries go to enormous lengths to reduce reflection overhead, but that's hard to justify for most things, and hard to maintain even once done. The legendary https://github.com/segmentio/encoding seems to be abandoned now and progress on Go JSON in general seems to have died with https://github.com/go-json-experiment/json .

    Many people claiming their projects are IO-bound are just assuming that's the case because most of the time is spent in their input reader. If they actually measured they'd see it's not even saturating a 100Mbps link, let alone 1-100Gbps, so by definition it is not IO-bound. Even if they didn't need more throughput than that, they still could have put those cycles to better use or at worst saved energy. Isn't that what people like to say about Go vs Python, that Go saves energy? Sure, but it still burns a lot more energy than it would if it had macros.

    Rust can use state-of-the-art memory allocators like mimalloc, while Go is still stuck on an old fork of tcmalloc, and not just tcmalloc in its original C, but transpiled to Go so it optimizes much less than LLVM would optimize it. (Many people benchmarking them forget to even try substitute allocators in Rust, so they're actually underestimating just how much faster Rust is)

    Finally, even Go Generics have failed to improve performance, and in many cases can make it unimaginably worse through -- I kid you not -- global lock contention hidden behind innocent type assertion syntax: https://planetscale.com/blog/generics-can-make-your-go-code-...

    It's not even close. There are many reasons Go is a lot slower than Rust and many of them are likely to remain forever. Most of them have not seen meaningful progress in a decade or more. The GC has improved, which is great, but that's not even a factor on the Rust side.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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