Rust and Go vs everything else — Bitfield Consulting
This is an edited version of a recent interview with me by Alex Pliutau, for his excellent packagemain.tech newsletter. Thanks, Alex!
Should you Rust, or should you Go? Which language is better, and does that question even make sense? Let’s talk about Go versus Rust in 2024, with our special guest, John Arundel. John is the author of For the Love of Go, Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes, and many other books [including The Secrets of Rust: Tools].
John, we seem to be hearing more and more about Rust these days. Can you give us a quick introduction? What is Rust for, and why does it exist?
Not at all. Graydon Hoare, the originator of Rust, got frustrated when the elevators in his building kept breaking down due to software problems. He thought “Surely we can do better than this!” And the rest is history.
We can’t prevent all bugs, but we can at least use a programming language that eliminates some major categories of bugs, such as buffer overflows, data races, and “use after free” issues. So from the very beginning, Rust’s focus has been on building reliable software, automating many of the safety checks that good programmers do anyway, and helping to catch mistakes before they reach production.
