Rust vs Golang: Coming from Python (I know technically it's not necessarily the right comparison)

58 points Brave-Ad-1829

I have a c/c++ background from many years ago. But I spent the rest on Python. I think it's great for machine learning use cases. But it's slow. I want to adopt a new language, and I'm stuck between go and rust. I prefer to become expert in one of these instead of knowing both with less depth. The projects and use cases I'm facing, involve a broad range of areas, including low and system level codes, web services, microservices, web scraping, natural language processing, machine learning, embedded, maybe blockchains etc.

Ideally, I should learn both! But I'd rather spend my time on the projects. I know GO is intuitive, fast, high level, great for web services, Google is right there , etc. But the fact that I already know Python, makes me wonder if it's time to go deep on sth like Rust. On the other hand, I know Rust is fast, very reliable, and memory safe, and it's feature-rich, something I really like about it. But the trade-off is it's high learning curve. For startups, it could be a challenge to hire good rust programmers, and you'll have to pay them higher (an advantage if I wanna find a job lol). I'm not sure about the libraries, and how well they're developed and maintained given that the community is smaller and there's a smaller presence in the industry. Besides, Rust is a go-to for blockchain projects. I don't know about GO.

I know it's a decision that probably I'll have to personally make in the end, but I just wanted to see what other fellow programmers and experts think.