4
Programming Languages
Rust vs Go for a CLI tool distributed to thousands of developers
Performance ↔ Development speed
Context
We're building a developer CLI (think: code generation, local dev environment orchestration). Needs to be a single binary for macOS, Linux and Windows. Team knows Go better; a couple of engineers are keen on Rust.
RustvsGo
Community verdict
Rust 40%Go 60%
10 engineers · 2 opinions
With these constraints, what would you choose?
One choice per engineer. You can change it any time.
Rust
Go
Dev speed →
Trade-offs
Dimensions
RustGoout of 5
- Performance
- 5Rust scores 5 of 54Go scores 4 of 5
- Dev speed
- 2Rust scores 2 of 55Go scores 5 of 5
- Binary size
- 4Rust scores 4 of 5
Community discussion
2 comments
Have you made this decision in production? Share your reasoning.
Sign in to commentGOOS=windows go buildand you're done. For a CLI that mostly shells out and does I/O, Go's compile speed and simplicity win.If the CLI parses large files or does heavy local work, Rust's performance and error handling with
Resultare worth it. clap is also a better CLI framework than anything in Go.