Go vs Rust: Rating, Votes and Features
- License: Go — BSD-3-Clause; Rust — MIT or Apache-2.0.
- Paradigms: Go — Concurrent, Procedural; Rust — Concurrent, Functional, Procedural.
- Memory management: Go — Garbage collected; Rust — Ownership and borrowing.
Go — November 2026: 3 votes, rating 7.1/10.
Rust — November 2026: 4 votes, rating 7.8/10.
| Go | Rust | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | programming language | programming language |
| Developer | Rust Foundation | |
| Created by | Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson | Graydon Hoare |
| First release | 2009 | 2012 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT or Apache-2.0 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| Website | https://go.dev | https://www.rust-lang.org |
| Paradigms | Concurrent, Procedural | Concurrent, Functional, Procedural |
| Typing | Static | Static |
| Type strength | Strong | Strong |
| Type inference | Yes | Yes |
| Memory management | Garbage collected | Ownership and borrowing |
| Runs as | Native code | Native code |
| Main implementation | gc, the Go toolchain | rustc (LLVM) |
| Concurrency | Goroutines and channels | Threads, async/await, checked for data races |
| Null safety | No | Yes |
| Package manager | Go modules | Cargo |
| Used for | Back end, Systems | Back end, Embedded, Systems |
| Specification | The Go Programming Language Specification | The Ferrocene Language Specification, adopted by the Rust project in 2025 |