Rewrote Everything in Rust. Massive Mistake. Go Was Better

Imagine you’re building a house. You pick the shiniest, most powerful tools, thinking they’ll make your work flawless. But halfway through, you realize those tools are slowing you down, breaking things, and making life harder. That’s what happened when my team rewrote our entire backend in Rust. We thought it’d be a game-changer. Spoiler: it wasn’t. Go, our old reliable hammer, was better for the job. Here’s our story, packed with lessons for coders of all levels, from beginners to pros.

Why We Chose Rust

Rust is like a sports car in the programming world: fast, safe, and loved for its performance. It’s a systems programming language (a language used to build low-level software like operating systems or drivers) that promises speed and memory safety. Memory safety means fewer bugs like crashes or security holes caused by mishandling a computer’s memory. Rust’s fans, including big names like Mozilla and Dropbox, rave about its ability to write code that’s both blazing fast and rock-solid.

Our project was a backend for a real-time analytics platform, handling thousands of requests per second. We were using Go, a language known for its simplicity and speed in building web servers. Go was doing fine, but we wanted better. Rust’s zero-cost abstractions (a fancy way of saying it runs as…