Summary Statically-typed, compiled languages will deliver better performance than their competitors. Golang and Rust are excellent options. Golang will be slightly more latent but has excellent concurrency, built-in garbage collection, and was designed by Google high throughput with minimal blocking time. Rust will be more performant and will use fewer CPU cycles and memory per unit time. Still, your development time will be longer than Golang, especially if you're coming from a dynamically typed language. If you chose Rust, Rocket is a good option (Nickel is another one you can check out for high performance); if you chose Golang, FastHTTP is highly performant.

If you're looking for near real-time performance with minimal CPU utilization: statically typed, compiled languages deliver the most optimizations. Their compilers can best optimize the executable because they know which data type to expect for every variable instantiated. If you're coming from a dynamically typed language, Golang features real-time garbage collection, concurrency, and dynamic-like variable assignment. Rust does not have garbage collection and relies on a program's developer(s) to clean up after themselves. Not having garbage collection in a language leads to highly performant code, however, as the programmer determines when garbage is collected and memory deallocated or reassigned.

For a look at Rust vs. Golang vs. Python's execution times, you can look at these two pages: Golang vs. Python Benchmarks and Golang vs. Rust Benchmarks. On average, you will see Rust is faster than Golang is faster than Python. Rust and Golang are close to each other in performance terms (compared to Python especially), but Rust uses less memory and CPU cycles per unit time.

If concurrency or high throughput is more important than latency, use Golang. Golang has a built-in concurrency mechanism that is amazing at yielding high throughput and eliminating, or controlling, when a subroutine blocks the rest of the main routine. Golang also supports defining structs in a way similar to classes, allowing you to access the function like a Python class method (using the dot . operator). Golang also allows for dynamic variable type assignment using the walrus := operator within a function, easing the switch from a dynamically typed language to a statically typed one. Golang's built-in garbage collector and concurrency methods, dynamic variable assignment via the walrus operator, method-like function calling will minimize your development time between Golang and Rust if you're coming from a dynamically typed language.

We all know that when performance matters, though, it really matters. Rust does not have a garbage collector, allowing code executions with the smallest latency. The rust compiler is very helpful and has been known to catch most possible runtime errors helping to prevent your code from throwing an error and stopping execution. Rust will deliver faster performance over Golang.

Gavin Siver

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