Why Rust Beats Go and Zig for Backend Development: A Hands‑On Comparison

In this article I try and compare Go, Zig, and Rust, and explain why Rust wins.

Go Language

Several months ago I started building development tools with Go. The first project was a basic database management and migration utility (dbdaddy), which I enjoyed writing in Go. It was my first serious Go project beyond Advent of Code challenges, and I became proficient in less than a week.

Zig

During this time I explored Zig as a hobby, intrigued by Redis switching to a technically non‑open source license. I wondered how hard it would be to build a new open‑source Redis in Zig.

The core idea behind "GbCache" is an LRU‑based memory cache that persists true data to disk, supports key/value change notifications, and TTL per key.

Zig’s explicitness impressed me, making it simple and easy to use. I approached GbCache from the perspective of "Can it handle HyperScale tomorrow?" This led me to discard Go because I couldn’t be certain about memory allocation and speed control.

Seeing the program’s hot paths—potential crashes, memory exhaustion, bottlenecks—became a valuable learning experience. Zig lets me pinpoint exactly when and where memory is allocated, but it is not a memory‑safe language, and mastering it feels like climbing Everest.

Rust

Over the past two years I tried Rust three times and quit in frustration. My background is JavaScript, and I never fully understood Rust’s strict rules. Yet Rust kept resurfacing because of its unique syntax, memory rules, and lifetimes.

When writing Zig I realized the mental burden of tracking ownership and borrowing. I started noticing patterns in my Zig code that Rust already solves.

While building a CLI client for a simple file storage system (SFS) I gave Rust another try. I like Rust’s ownership and borrowing model because it provides a mental model for memory safety with less cognitive load compared to C or Zig, where you must manually track each allocation.

Quick Summary

Go

Fast (like your 5 MAU need it)

Reliable

Very simple; the language never blocks you from achieving goals

Great package ecosystem

Zig

Blazing fast

Very "stupid" simple

Rust

Blazing fast

Reliable

Decent package ecosystem

If you are a backend engineer who likes to quantify sprint performance, Go might be the best fit.

"But my company doesn’t use Go—" "Leave the company, leave it, use the tool that fits. Leave that company."

For me, Go feels like an arranged marriage: never a rush, never disappointing, a lifelong partner.

Now let’s look at a multithreaded safety example in Rust.

use std::thread;
fn main() {
    let mut counter = Box::new(0); // 32-bit integer allocated on the heap
    let mut handles = vec![];

    for _ in 0..10 {
        let handle = thread::spawn(|| {
            *counter += 1; // trying to edit the value
        });
        handles.push(handle);
    }

    for handle in handles {
        handle.join().unwrap(); // WAITING FOR ALL THE THREADS TO COMPLETE
    }

    println!("Result: {}", *counter);
}

This code allocates a value on the heap and spawns ten threads that each try to modify it. In other languages this would compile and run, but Rust refuses to compile because the mutable borrow of *counter occurs multiple times across iterations, violating ownership rules.

Borrowing the owner’s value for mutation is called a "mutable borrow".

In languages without such checks, the responsibility to avoid data races falls on the developer; Rust catches it at compile time, preventing subtle bugs.

Conclusion

I really wish there were a language that could solve all these problems; Go comes close, but the best choice depends on your use case and, most importantly, your team.

For me, using Rust is a joy.