Rust for Backend Development: Pros and Cons

Kacper Bąk
2 min readFeb 10, 2023
Photo by Anaya Katlego on Unsplash

Rust and Go are both excellent languages for backend development, but which one is best? Each language has its advantages, and depending on the specific project, one may be more suitable than the other.

Rust is a high-performance language, but it has a steep learning curve. This means it can take a long time for new developers to feel comfortable using it. Additionally, although Rust is great for single-threaded tasks, it does not have as many capabilities as Go when it comes to concurrent tasks.

Go, on the other hand, is much easier to learn than Rust. It also has goroutines, which make it much better suited to dealing with multiple requests at the same time. Additionally, Go has excellent pattern-matching capabilities.

One example of the successful use of Rust is the Discord chat platform. Discord was able to rewrite one of its microservices from Go to Rust, and it solved its problem with the garbage collector. This example serves to demonstrate that, in the right situation, Rust can be the right choice.

Although Rust is a fantastic language, it is not necessarily the best choice for every backend project. In certain cases, C might be a better choice, and in other cases, runtime environments like Node.js or frameworks in other languages might be the most suitable solution.

Ultimately, the decision of which language to use for a backend project comes down to the specific requirements of the project. Developers must consider the pros and cons of different languages to make the best decision.

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