Rust vs Go: choosing a backend stack

What you end up with: an informed answer to “which of these two should we build this in”, backed by benchmarks you ran yourself rather than blog posts you read.

This is a comparison track rather than a build track, but it is not opinion writing. Each article implements the same thing twice — a JSON API, a worker pool, a streaming endpoint — and reports what happened: lines of code, latency, memory, compile time, and how long it took to debug.

What you’ll compare

• The same HTTP API in Axum and in net/http, benchmarked
• Concurrency: goroutines versus async tasks and threads, and when the difference shows up
• Error handling: if err != nil versus Result and ?
• Compile and iteration speed, measured over a week of real work
• Deployment: one binary versus one binary, and the container size question
• Memory under load, with actual numbers from both
• Hiring and onboarding: what each language costs a team
• A decision table: which to pick for which kind of project

Articles

• Performance in real workloadsthroughput, latency, and memory per request
• Concurrency models comparedgoroutines and channels versus threads and async
• Error handling in both languagesif err != nil versus Result and ?
• Deployment and binary sizestatic binaries, cross-compilation, images
• Hiring and team adoptionwho is available, and how long onboarding takes
• A decision table for your next backendthe criteria, weighted

Before you start

You do not need to know Go, but you do need to be comfortable writing Rust: this track will not explain ownership, and both implementations assume you can read the other language’s syntax.