Video ZJ6dVVobjaI

[00:00] Hello everyone, as you may have already noticed from the intro, this video is all about Rust vs Go.

[00:18] In particular, we are going to talk about the differences between the two languages, as well as the specific areas in which each of them shines. So without further ado, let's get started with the video. One of the main differences between Rath and Go is definitely simplicity.

[00:33] In fact, it is one of the most popular Go selling points. Becoming productive in Go usually takes a few hours or days, whereas in Rath it could take a few weeks. That has a direct effect on collaboration, because Go programs, doing easy to read and

[00:49] easy to write, are easy to manage in large teams. Also because it's more difficult to get your colleagues to learn a complex language like Rust, whereas with Go, a few hours or days, you start to become productive.

[01:02] But that simplicity comes at a cost. But if you are Go, it strives to have the simplest possible programs. And therefore, some very nice features that most modern languages have, such as generics and functional programming, are lacking in Go.

[01:18] To see how convenient those features can be, I'm going to show you an example. Let's say you have a list of elements and you want to extract a sub-list of those elements that satisfy even criteria, which is a very common task in programming.

[01:32] So in this example we have a list of integers and we want to extract a sub with the even element In languages that enable functional programming you can use the filter function to solve this

[01:44] challenge in a single line of code by just supplying an anonymous function or lambda to the filter function. On the other hand with Go, you are stuck with a good old for loop, which of course works, but it's definitely not elegant. So Rust is a very powerful language,

[02:00] very flexible language but it has a steep learning curve so getting started with it can take a few weeks and not everybody is willing to make that effort. Another very big difference is memory

[02:13] management. You surely know that Go has a garbage collector in the same way Java, Python or JavaScript do. On the other hand Rasta has a manual memory management system which is based on the

[02:25] on the concept of ownership and borrowing. So, in that case, RASP gives you a lot of flexibility and freedom, making it possible to write very performant code, but of course that comes at price.

[02:37] Following the Peter Parker principle, with great power comes great responsibility. So you definitely have to be careful when using RASP, even though the RASP compiler is very good at catching memory bugs at compile time.

[02:50] So, another important topic is concurrency. who has great support for concurrency. In fact, coroutines and channels are my favorite feature of the language. With that said, most of these features, such as coroutines and channels,

[03:04] are available also in Rust, directly using the standard library or through third libraries just for you What more is that Rust concurrency model is provably correct which means the compiler can catch a whole class of thread safety bugs at compile time

[03:20] before your program even runs, which makes it pretty hard to do basic concurrency mistakes, such as writing to the same shared variable without any synchronization. Then we need to talk about the ecosystem.

[03:34] So, Golang simplicity, combined with the fact that it's been around for more, makes it more popular than Rust, at least by the time of this video. Which means that generally libraries and frameworks are more mature on Go compared to Rust, especially those related to web development.

[03:52] But I'm going to be more specific about this topic later. Another interesting difference is compilation time. Go compiler is much faster than the Rust one, and that's mostly due to the number of optimization

[04:05] and checks the Rust compiler does, which means that in large Rust projects you can expect to wait for a while while compiling. One thing they have in common though is deployment, because both of them produce a static binary as an output, which means that in order to run it,

[04:21] you don't need an interpreter, such as for Python, or a virtual machine, such as for Java. you just need to deploy these executables. So when to use Go? Go is very well suited to build services and simple applications.

[04:36] It was built to replace Java and C-Sharp. So if you want to build for example a web rest API, then Go can be a very good choice. When to use Rust Well Rust is a system programming language So it a very good fit if you need efficiency and performance Moreover when you draft the fundamentals working with Rust becomes a very nice experience

[04:58] Rust is very well suited for performance visual applications, such as web browsers, databases, operating systems, or for example libraries that do heavy mathematical computations. In all those cases, Rust is a great fit.

[05:12] On the other hand, there is a more controversial topic which is web development. And while at the moment there is a lot of movement in the RAST community about web development, the libraries are not yet as mature as the Go counterparts.

[05:26] Then of course you need to think about the trade-offs. Rust is a very efficient and performance language, but in most web services the bottleneck is not in the CPU and the computation,

[05:38] but instead is in the input output, for example waiting for a database reply or a file read on the app. In those cases, having Rust won't help much. Because writing Rust programs is more complex and time consuming than writing Go or Python programs,

[05:55] in most cases Rust should not be used, but of course there are exceptions. Let's imagine a service on the web that takes a real-time stream of data and do some sort of CPU intensive computation on that.

[06:09] In those cases, Rust can be a very good choice, but as always, use the right tool for the job. Right, so that was all for this video, I really hope you liked it. If you did, please consider subscribing and liking the video because it really helps.

[06:21] If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to write them below. I hope to see you in the next video.