I ask because I've started a side project in rust because all of its guarantees were appealing to me (I don't want to spend too much time on bugs, and my code uses some threads). I also need maximum performances. So I've chosen it. But now I have my compilation times that reach 45 seconds, so I'm slowly wondering if the go balance (towards fast compilation) would not be more advantageous; unless of course, performances are real bad...
There are a bunch of different metrics for performance that it is a little hard to compare.
Rust will have faster CPU and memory performance. It has no GC (well, other than RC). If you are IO bound, there won't be much of an appreciable difference, assuming you are using Rust's async/await for stuff. If you are using threads directly, then it will be a lot easier to make goroutines faster for IO stuff.
The long compile time of rust has a lot to do with it's LLVM backend, which is ultimately generating pretty fast code. You don't get that with go (well, unless gollvm lands). Go traded execution speed for compile speed by doing their own compiler/optimizer. Generally speaking, that doesn't really matter (hence the reason python is popular).
It's about on par with Java and C#, which is roughly in the ballpark of "half as fast as Rust/C/C++". If your goal is to spend less time programming overall, Go is great for most applications. If your goal is to spend 10% less time fixing bugs and 100% more time writing code, Rust is great for most applications. :) Of course those figures are made up, but in my experience they're in the right ballpark (I like both languages, but if I actually want to get something done in a reasonable timeframe I always end up using Go).
As someone who has started side projects with very technical and opinionated friends, just stick with Rust.
Make a decision, stick with it, ship it. If there's a real problem, change it after you have it up and running. There's no point in optimizing for millions of users if you have 0 users now.
yeah sure, I have zero user and well, it may be like that until my death :-)
that project was an excuse for learning rust. But now I understant rust a bit more, well, I'm a bit scare to wait 45 sec on each build for a side project (ie a project I do on my very limited spare time) :-)
but anyway, rust is really cool to work with (I have a python/C++/assembler/R background). The level of checking it does is really mindblowing (and frustrating at times :-))
Try to debug where your compile times are going[1][2], but if you want a good rule of thumb: separate your crate into multiple if you can (that way incremental compilation will yield better results), switch to an alternative linker, like mold or lld, and use trait objects instead of generics (monomorphization can be expensive during compilation, while trait objects can be slower at runtime, but not enough to be worth it worrying about it).
Thanks to some hints in those articles (basically, enabling incremental builds on release mode), I've been able to remove about 70% (yes!) of the build time :-)
Go is slower than Rust. Rust allows you to go as fast as the metal can get you if you want.
But Go is still reasonably performant and has a reasonably low memory footprint. We're talking C#/Java level performance with C level memory footprint.
I ask because I've started a side project in rust because all of its guarantees were appealing to me (I don't want to spend too much time on bugs, and my code uses some threads). I also need maximum performances. So I've chosen it. But now I have my compilation times that reach 45 seconds, so I'm slowly wondering if the go balance (towards fast compilation) would not be more advantageous; unless of course, performances are real bad...