Why Big Companies Are Migrating From Golang to Rust

In the tech world, programming languages are like brands. Rust and Golang have been growing in popularity in the last few years. Since the release of Go in 2009 and Rust in 2015, both worlds have most certainly given birth to an array of various products and services.

Although both of them have been pretty popular among developers for years, it seems that Rust has recently taken the lead in their race. Why is that so?

In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at why Rust has been increasingly adopted by big companies, how Rust compares to Go, and why companies choose to migrate from Go to Rust.

Why do Goland and Rust deserve their place in the sun?

Golang and Rust are both very popular right now because they’re perfect for building complex systems that need to be fast and efficient. To understand their popularity, let’s take a look at their advantages.

How Google came up with a simple yet powerful programming language

Golang is a programming language from Google, which was created to solve Google’s needs. They believe that Go can solve many of the problems that they see in modern software development.

Golang is known as an easy-to-use language that can be used for web development, server-side applications, or anything else you might need. Golang was created as an alternative to C++ and Java, which have been widely used in development over the past few decades. The popularity of C++ and Java has been declining in recent years due to their complexity compared to Golang, which is much easier to learn and use. Among its other benefits are:

Golang is famous for its speed. The fact that it compiles directly into machine code makes it fast to execute. Golang programs generally run faster than those written, for example, in Java because of its lightweight design and simple syntax, which require less processing power from your computer’s CPU when executing instructions from memory compared to other languages where there are more complex operations happening at once (such as manipulating data structures).

Easy syntax. Golang’s syntax isn’t as complex as other popular programming languages like C++ or Java, which makes it easier to learn and use even for beginners with no prior programming experience. Golang code is also statically typed, which means that you don’t have to worry about whether your variables are integers or strings because the compiler will catch any mistakes before they can cause problems. This makes it much easier to write bug-free code than if you were using dynamically typed languages like Javascript or Perl.
Platform-independence. Another advantage of Golang is that it works on Windows, Linux, and Unix systems.
Golang is built on top of the CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) model, which makes it easy to write concurrent programs without much effort. It also uses Goroutines that make it easy to write concurrent programs without worrying about thread safety issues.

How Rust is gradually taking over the market

The programming language Rust is a growing force in the industry. Its use has grown rapidly over the last few years, and it is now considered one of the most popular languages.

Rust is supported by Mozilla Research but was originally developed by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla Corporation. It was designed with similar goals to C++11 (e.g., zero-cost abstractions) while also addressing some of the shortcomings of C++ (e.g., lack of memory safety). Among its main advantages are:

Rust is also designed to be easy-to-use, but it focuses more on safety than ease of use. That doesn’t mean you can’t write unsafe code in Rust, though — it just means that when writing safe code, it’s easier than ever before!

Rust is a fast and secure system programming language that prevents segfaults. All thanks to not having a garbage collector. It helps you write code that’s fast, memory safe, and maintainable.
Rust is a great language for writing low-level code or libraries without having to worry about memory management or CPU optimization at all. For example, if you have some C bindings that you need to use in your application, Rust will make it easy to write cross-platform code without having to worry about pointers, manual memory management, and other common issues with C/C++ projects.

If both languages are so good, then let’s figure out why switching from Go to Rust makes sense.

What advantages does Rust have over Go?

There are a few reasons why companies currently prefer Rust to Golang or sometimes even migrate to it:

Rust vs Go: Performance

Rust has proven to be faster than Go in most cases because of its memory-safe properties that allow it to optimize aggressively without fear of crashing. This means that applications written in Rust will not only be faster but also more stable than those written in Go.

Rust vs Go: Memory Safety

Rust is a memory safety-oriented language which guarantees that there are no data races at runtime, even when multiple threads access mutable state simultaneously. This feature makes it possible for Rust to perform automatic checks that prevent common errors like dangling pointers and buffer overflows from happening, while also making it possible for programmers to write code that handles these situations elegantly without needing manual interception.

Rust vs Go: Memory management

Rust uses a concept called “ownership” to track which resources are being used by each variable. This allows Rust to automatically release those resources when they go out of scope.

We figured out why Rust gets a bit ahead of Golang. It’s critical to point out that we enumerated the most common ones. If you’re interested in more, you have to check out the Go vs Rust benchmark in detail to see how they differentiate.

However, how do all of these characteristics affect businesses? Why do big companies migrate from Golang to Rust, and how do Rust’s benefits help them?

Why do big companies migrate from Golang to Rust?

First, let’s look at companies that somehow initiated migrating from Golang to Rust. Rust use cases include:

Discord is switching from Go, Rust as their main programming language now
Dropbox, Coursera, Fogma, Cloudflare, Facebook, and even Microsoft are integrating Rust into their services

Why is there such a shift towards Rust?

The answer is that Rust has emerged as a more reliable and secure programming language than Go. Golang is a great language, but it is not without its flaws. For example, it lacks generics and built-in support for concurrency. This makes it harder to write highly concurrent applications compared to Rust.

The main reason why companies are migrating from Golang to Rust is because of its ability to provide memory safety, which means that it will not allow bad memory accesses to happen. Memory safety is important because it helps prevent bugs that can cause data corruption or security breaches.

Why the future is still bright for both languages

It is impossible to deny that both Rust and Go are incredibly popular languages. Both of them have the potential to grow significantly and become more widespread, especially in areas like cloud computing and web development.

Despite the fact that both Rust and Golang are programming languages that emerged in a relatively short time frame, they are not that similar to one another, each having their own strengths and weaknesses. While Rust was developed with the aim of overcoming Go’s shortcomings, Golang is essential for creating forward-compatible code, which will also be relevant in the future. However, in terms of speed, memory management, and safety, Rust is gradually winning the competition.