When it comes to web development the most prominent question that plagues every developer’s mind is- what language to use? And although, this decision majorly depends on what is the requirement of the project or what the client desires, the developers still have a lot of aspects to consider before settling on any one language.
As a developer, you must make the right choice because which language you choose has a great impact on how your website is going to turn out. For the last few years, two major contenders for the best programming languages have been GO and RUST. In this article, we’re going to discuss both languages in detail, their similarities & differences, and what factors you must consider before choosing the language that best meets your website’s particular needs.
In this article, we’re going to explore-
- Explore GO or Golang in Detail
- What is Go?
- What are the advantages of Go in Web Development?
- When is it most suitable to use Go?
- Explore RUST in Detail
- What is Rust?
- What are the advantages of Rust in Web Development?
- When is it most suitable to use Rust?
- Similarities between Go and Rust
- Differences between Go and Rust
- Key Takeaway: Which one to pick for web development?
So, what are you waiting for? Let’s go and find out which language is most suitable for web development.
Exploring Go ‘Golang’ in Detail
What is Go?
Google programmers created the Go programming language because they needed something as efficient as C++ but simpler to understand, write, read, and use. The developers of Go were inspired by C++ and aimed to create a language that has the benefits of other languages without having its drawbacks. Qualities such as static typing, runtime, and simplicity were included in the Go to make it an amalgamation of the best qualities of languages like C, Python, and JavaScript.
The Go language has risen to prominence in the development community during the past ten years, according to the results of a StackOverflow developer survey. Popular businesses like Google, Uber, Twitch, Dailymotion, and Dropbox employ the Go programming language for their apps.
Furthermore, google engineers primarily created Golang so they could make use of it for internal projects, which is why the most well-known applications of the Go programming language are Google Chrome and Google Earth.
Some highlighting features of Go:
- It is an extremely minimalistic language in nature.
- Go is a compiled language.
- It is fast.
- Go is easy to learn and offers great flexibility to the user.
- It is easy to scale and simple to use.
What are the Advantages of Go in Web Development?
Before choosing a language for web development, you should probably be aware of what Golang has to offer. Let’s look at a few benefits of Go.
- Go is a very fast language.
Golang can be instantly converted into machine instructions and doesn’t require an interpreter. As a result, fewer intermediate phases are required, which promotes quicker development. When it comes to latency and high, the Go language is always more proactive than Java.
- It is a dynamic environment for developers.
Golang is becoming more and more popular among programmers since it is an extremely speedy language. Over 1 million seasoned Go developers use Go as their primary language. The number may be greater than 2 million if we include engineers and designers who mostly work with other programming languages but occasionally use Go. Long-term projections indicate that this number will rise excessively.
- Go generates incredibly readable code
Go inherits the readability of Python and the run-time effectiveness of C. The Go syntax is simple to learn for ordinary programmers, especially if they have good English skills. Surface-level components like indentation and spacing are automatically adjusted by Gofmt. In addition, golint runs additional style checks. Go is so user-friendly that beginners are immediately drawn to it.
- Golang is flexible.
When choosing a piece of software for a company, scalability is frequently a crucial consideration. With Golang, there are several scaling solutions accessible. At a certain stage, it allows the use of a variety of skills. You could use Golang for a very long time if you so desired.
- Go is a simple language to learn.
It doesn’t take months to get proficient with this command-line program. You won’t have any trouble comprehending sentence structure if you’re just starting. Go’s programming environment is similar to C’s. Arguments and exchanges in Golang are not that difficult for beginners to understand which makes it extremely popular amongst new programmers.
When is it Most Suitable to Use Go?
There are numerous application kinds that the Go programming language can be applied. According to a recent report, Go programming was popular for 66% of web development, 45% of databases, 42% of network programming, 38% of systems programming, and 37% of DevOps jobs.
The majority of Go developers think that Go favors networking services because of its inclination for concurrency. As the best language for server-side development, Golang is frequently commended. Quick page execution is more important than you might think for increasing brand recognition online.
The language also formally supports the Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud offers a wide range of services, many of which use the concept of cloud computing. So, when it comes to high-performance cloud apps, Go thrives.
Exploring Rust in Detail
What is Rust?
Graydon Hoare created Rust, a built, statically typed programming language, while he was employed by Mozilla Research. The grammar of this open-source language is comparable to C++. This is a concurrency, security, and functionality-rich language. The Rust programming language combines a high execution reliability guarantee with a compile-time accuracy guarantee.
This system language guarantees memory security by expanding the ideas of previous system languages like C++ (no crashes, no data races). Rust is now the language of choice for the majority of developers, with a popularity rating of more than 86%, according to Stack Overflow.
Rust is favored above other languages by several businesses for their IT stacks. It improves the efficiency of applications and memory management. Rust’s features are used by organizations like Figma, Cloudflare, Discord, and Amazon for their web services, among others.
Some highlighting features of Rust:
- This language runs exceptionally fast.
- Reliable memory safety is ensured by its compiler.
- Abstraction techniques with no cost guarantee and quick run-time.
- It works with various platforms.
- Its behavior during runtime is predictable.
What are the Advantages of Rust in Web Development?
Now that you know what Rust is and how it speeds up the design while merging the power of C++ and other programming languages, let’s examine what makes Rust so intriguing:
- Rust functions well with complex programs.
Contrary to C, Rust offers a single package named Cargo for many different tasks, including compilation, execution, getting libraries, and automatically creating instructions.
Even the simplest of Rust programs do not have any dependencies. Therefore, the portion of Cargo that deals with building your code would be used if the “Hello, world!” project had been built with it. You’ll need to add dependencies as you build more complicated Rust programs and doing so will be a lot simpler if you start a project with Cargo. Rust handles complex applications well when the process consists of several files.
- It is an efficient language.
Since it utilizes a compiler, Rust is essentially always faster than a conventional interpreted language like Python. Even when compared to programming languages like Java, which have a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler designed specifically for performance enhancement, Rust is faster.
- Rust prioritizes security
To ensure memory security, Rust makes use of an extremely strict compiler that meticulously checks each variable. When it comes to Rust things like segfaults, also referred to as segmentation faults, don’t exist.
Applications crash when a segfault tries to access, read from, or write to an unauthorized region of memory. To get around these issues, Rust’s ownership mechanism looks at the RAM that your application is using at build time.
- Offers free abstractions
Rust has a few characteristics that show its developers had every intention of developing an organized syntax that would enhance user experience. Free abstractions are one of the features that Rust offers. Abstractions can be compared to the extra loops and turns used in high-level languages. High-level code must be translated into a low-level language, machine code, or both to be executed.
These abstractions frequently result in some performance slowdown. However, Rust does not distinguish between low-level and abstract code in terms of performance. So, using abstractions doesn’t need to sacrifice performance. They’re offered without cost.
- Memory Management Solution
Low-level memory control is a crucial part of system programming, and C’s manual memory management can make this process a genuine pain. Rust provides unequaled convenience on low-level details because it doesn’t require a garbage collector to operate continually in the background. It has immediate access to memory and hardware.
When is it Most Suitable to Use Rust?
Rust and other programming languages are practically universal. But some places are better suited for it than others. Rust thrives in systems programming due to its high-quality performance and unrestricted abstractions. Systems programming is the process of creating the various software components required for the system to function as a whole.
According to IBM, the system programmer installs, alters, and maintains the operating system as well as installs or updates system software. Given that C++ has had some influence on Rust, it is not surprising that the language has some middle-level features.
These capabilities or features are frequently used in the development of computer programs because they can handle the level of complexity required to manage the memory on the hardware side of things. The lack of abstraction does not prevent them from being readable by the human eye, which is unusual in machine code. And even if there can be some debate in the IT world over what counts as a middle-level language or not, Rust is viewed as a modern language with machine-oriented potential.
Similarities between Go and Rust
Before we move towards discussing how Go and Rust are different or which one better meets the needs of your business, let’s first cover the few similarities both languages share which could end up benefiting your development process.
- Rich Standard Libraries
Many characteristics are similar between Rust and Go, particularly in web programming. Both have extensive standard libraries but Go tends to handle internet-centric protocols like HTTP out of the box.
- Open-Source
Both languages are open source, so no company will ever steal the source code from us. However, it is important to note that Google is primarily responsible for Go’s development, whereas Rust is more of a communal endeavor.
Having support from a firm has its benefits as well as drawbacks. Go benefits from a huge tech company’s resources and PR, whereas Rust never runs the risk of having Google-specific agendas pushed on the project.
- New Languages
Since Java and JavaScript are both established languages, Go and Rust doesn’t have the same baggage in terms of legacy and backward compatibility.
Release of Rust v1: May 15, 2015
Launch of Go v1: March 28, 2012
Differences between Go and Rust
Let’s compare Rust and Go and see what are the points that make these two languages differ from each other-
- Performance
Go was introduced by Google as a replacement for C++ because it was simpler to learn and program in. Go includes goroutines, which you can use to run functions as subprocesses by adding the go syntax and makes their use simple.
However, Rust outperforms Go despite these practical characteristics and support for multicore CPUs. Algorithms and resource-intensive tasks can be carried out effectively with Rust. Rust was 30% quicker in the benchmarks game when testing the algorithms, and at least 1000% faster when performing binary tree calculations. Rust makes use of runtime abstractions with zero costs for memory processing and management.
Rust is therefore chosen over Go in situations or for specific projects where performance is a must.
- Concurrency
Concurrency is supported by Go, which outperforms Rust in this area. Go is a productive language because its concurrency architecture enables programmers to distribute workloads over multiple CPU cores.
Go’s goroutines lets you run each request as a separate process while you’re managing API requests on a web server. As it distributes jobs among all available CPU cores, this approach considerably increases efficiency. Contrarily, Rust concurrency only has a native await sync syntax to support. Rust ensures memory safety, yet developers prefer to Go for concurrency because of this reason.
- Memory Safety
Memory safety is prioritized in both Go and Rust. However, data races in Go are a possibility for performance reasons. Rust’s main selling point and benefit are that it provides memory safety. Rust emphasizes type safety to enable memory-safe concurrency. The strict compiler in Rust verifies each memory address and each variable you use. This function alerts you to any unusual behavior and makes every effort to prevent data races.
It guarantees that a developer won’t experience a buffer overflow or data race issue. Despite being a crucial component of Rust, memory safety has drawbacks of its own. One must be very careful and mindful of memory allocation while writing code. It is challenging to keep your memory safety guard active at all times.
- Development Speed
In some circumstances, development speed is more crucial than program performance or speed. Go has a quick language development cycle due to its simplicity and directness. Go runs more quickly and has a quicker compilation time. Now, Go provides both speed and simplicity, but at the expense of leaving out many crucial capabilities. Google has left out numerous elements that are present in other programming languages in Go to make it simpler.
Contrarily, Rust provides more features than Go. However, Rust takes longer to compile, particularly for programs with big dependency trees.
Go is therefore a far better option if a project’s priority is development speed and a quick development cycle. Rust is your best choice, nevertheless, if you are more concerned with execution speed and memory safety than development speed.
- Developer Experience
Because of its simplicity and usability, Go is frequently referred to as a “boring language” or “straightforward language” by developers. Go is simple to learn and use because of its small number of built-in capabilities. It is a less complex alternative to C++ while making concessions to aspects like memory allocation and memory safety.
While Rust has excellent memory safety protections, this results in more complex codes and less efficient developers. Rust is an unappealing and unwelcome alternative for many due to its support for passing pointers and ownership concepts.
In comparison to Go, Rust has a substantially steeper learning curve. Go, however, has a significantly higher learning curve than other languages like JavaScript and Python, which is also something that needs to be kept in mind.
Which one to pick for web development?
Key Takeaway: GO
Go is great for creating apps when you’re focusing on a variety of features in addition to security if you’re a DevOps team wanting to construct scalable, extendable software or system. Go focuses on use and simplicity. It has many different uses. For DevOps tools and small projects like microservice architecture, this is once again ideal.
Furthermore, the language includes a very simple concurrent design that makes creating high-performance programs quite simple. Go’s attractiveness stems from this, which gives it a lot of power. Production-ready microservices can be developed in a few hours. Go can be utilized in a range of use cases, from CLIs to web apps.
However, Golang makes it simple to make mistakes that have a big impact on performance. To put it another way, with Golang, if you don’t start paying attention and are unfamiliar with how it operates, your code won’t run smoothly and may have runtime problems, but with Rust, the compiler drives you to create code that is both fast and secure.
Key Takeaway: Rust
Rust, on the other hand, is more suited to developing programs with a limited scope where security is the only thing that matters and is quite difficult to learn and use. The systems programming language known as Rust prioritizes efficiency, speed, and low-level details. While Go only partially borrowed the C syntax to create a general-purpose language, Rust aims to replace C++ by creating a newer, simpler programming language.
Additionally, programmers can create libraries for general-purpose activities like RESTful API, streaming analytics, and much more using Rust’s excellent build system and zero-cost abstractions feature, giving Rust a chance to compete with Golang.
While Go is frequently used to construct simple applications, Rust may also be used to create massive systems with thousands of code blocks. Additionally, Rust can be used in environments like embedded devices, the edge, or Wasm where Go has less support. Because of the seeming garbage collector, Rust will operate somewhat more efficiently than Go. The distinction could change depending on the application, though. The results could change depending on how often the GC executes.
Conclusion
Now, it all comes down to choosing which language best suits your next development. Any language may be a good fit for you depending on your needs and goals, it’s a reality. The most effective method for determining the language you want to use is to examine the many benefits each language has to offer and select the one that best meets your needs.
Rust and Golang are both popular, modern, and frequently used languages, yet none is in direct competition with the other. They have numerous applications. For applications that manage massive volumes of data, Rust performs better than go, but Go’s rapid development time makes it a great choice for enterprise-level programs and large development teams.
Even if we may delve deeper into both languages and examine both sides of it, the main answer to the Go vs. Rust comparison will be dependent on the development and business goals. With increasing rivalry, each language has its advantages and disadvantages. There will be situations in which Golang will perform better than Rust, and vice versa. In the end, you’ll have to decide which language best meets your needs.
