Rust vs Go — What to choose while developing a blockchain app? | LITSLINK Blog (2024)

Blockchain has become increasingly relevant in recent decades, and this is well demonstrated by Demand Sage research. By 2026, the worldwide blockchain market will be worth $67.4 billion. If you don’t want to lose your relevance and be on trend, now is the time to delve into the field of blockchain. So, how to choose the right technology for development?

The purpose of this article is to highlight the differences between Go (Golang) and Rust programming languages. We will discuss their main advantages and disadvantages so that you will be able to select the best language for your future framework. Let’s start from the beginning — what you need for the development of a successful blockchain app.

What Is Required To Develop A Flawless Blockchain App?

Databases developed using blockchain technology are notoriously difficult to hack or manipulate, which makes them an ideal place to store sensitive data. Blockchain software improvement requires an understanding of how this technology works. To master framework software creation, developers have to be familiar with interdisciplinary concepts and popular programming languages for blockchain, such as Rust and Golang.

Programming for blockchain differs from traditional application building in several important ways. In fact, the effort is primarily spent on additional issues, such as deciding the most appropriate incentive scheme, the desired degree of transparency, specific group permissions, and so on.

Principal creators are responsible for the entire life cycle of blockchain application development. This process includes researching architecture and determining options for using on-chain apps. Innovators also optimize the blockchain database for different systems.

The main part of the development of blockchain applications focuses on information architecture, that is, how the database should actually be structured, and how that data should be distributed and accessed with different levels of permission. For example, spread registry technology should be the basis.

This decision, in turn, will affect everything: which parties will have access to particular data, how it will be shared between different groups, whether a majority vote will ensure that the information changes, and so on.

So, let’s focus on the most suitable programming languages for developing a great blockchain application, describing their strengths, weaknesses and use cases.

The Main Features You Need To Know About Rust Blockchain Language

Rust is a system programming language that runs fast, prevents almost all crashes and removes data-sharing uncertainties. Mozilla developed it as a tool to build Servo — its next-generation browser.

Mozilla employee Graydon Hore started forming the language in his spare time, in 2006. He had been working on his own for three years, until 2009 when Mozilla officially got involved. Rust language was officially released in 2010. The first alpha release of the language took place in 2012 — Rust was used to develop Servo, a web browser engine. In 2013, Samsung joined the work on Servo, and as a result, this code was ported to the ARM architecture.

We have selected 5 main features of Rust language for you:

• Concise syntax with keywords, similar to C++ syntax.
• Code parser to avoid memory leaks and multi-threading errors.
• Self-control of data location in memory (using pointers).
• No garbage collection.
• Powerful statistical typing.

Main Advantages, Disadvantages and Use Cases Of Rust

In this part, we’ll check out the difficulties you may encounter and look at the strengths of the language.

Arguments for using Rust language:

• There are abstractions that make it easy to regulate memory manually.
• A reliable system of interaction with memory, which eliminates errors of segmentation.
• Automatic presentation of ways to fix compilation errors.
• The compiler contains a builder and package manager, as well as tools for testing and creating documentation.
• No pointers can be used in safe code.
• Available description of errors in templates.

Arguments against using Rust:

• The compiler is too strict in fixing memory calls.
• No typical OOP-style inheritance and classes.

Rust code conforms to the four major concepts in programming: procedural, parallel, functional, and OOP. Therefore, Rust is a versatile language that can be applied in many areas — there are almost 7 basic examples of using it. They are programming client applications and web servers, blockchain, creating your own operating system, writing programs and applications to monitor systems and servers, development of general-purpose software, infrastructure creation and writing engines for browsers and games.

Rust Language For Blockchain Coding

One of the most essential requirements of blockchain networks is the high speed of operation within the web at a low level of server load. Many blockchains (e.g., Ethereum or Bitcoin) use C++ functionality to implement such conditions. Considering the above, creating infrastructure in Rust will be more effective.

Here are some examples of blockchain usage:

• Solana blockchain project development service.
• Exonum framework for the same purpose.
• MaidSafe — a decentralized platform for storing and working with information.

Rust Language For Neural Networks

So far, neural networks in Rust are mostly experiments. The language looks quite appealing for machine learning: it has low-level memory handling while using high-level abstractions, as well as high performance. All of this works on the Rust API and bodes well for its popularity. But so far in the Rust language ecosystem, there are almost no 100% proven and safe frameworks for neural network development that can compete with Python libraries.

The Main Features You Need To Know About Go / Golang Blockchain Language

Go is a programming language for crypto developed by Google Corporation, it is often also called “Golang”, short for “Google language”. It is a compiled and multithreaded language that was liberated in November 2009, with the most recent release of 1.6 dating back to February 2016.

One of the key figures involved in the creation of Go is Rob Pike, a well-known developer of compiled languages as well as operating systems, currently working for Google. Speaking at one of the conferences, he mentioned that Go is an attempt to adopt the best aspects of such languages as C++ and Java.

In Go, they tried to combine the speed development characteristic of C-like languages and the ease of development typical for Python. It was intended to be universal and now Golang for blockchain is best suited for server-side applications: parsers, complex computing systems, and multithreaded apps. It is used primarily in the backend, that is, in the development of the logic of applications and sites.

Google created the language so that even the most inexperienced programmers could write efficient code. At the time, it was more profitable to create a tool that could be handled without long training, instead of teaching developers almost from scratch.

The main feature of Go is its minimalism. Other compiled languages change, acquiring new features. The Go language was originally designed to be perfect for the task at hand, so it only changes to improve existing tools rather than adding new ones.

One of the distinctive features of the language is an original type system: it does not use inheritance (one of the principles of object-oriented programming). Go also operates a reduced syntax for defining variables and the syntax of anonymous functions.

Another feature of this language is parallelism, which means that any function can be executed simultaneously with another. Since Go is one of the best programming languages, there are regular discussions about the appropriateness of its use. In this part of the article, we will try to find out how popular the Go language is, whether it has any perspectives for development and what programmers think about this language.

Main Advantages, Disadvantages and Use Cases Of Golang

In this part, we will look at the challenges you may face while applying Go for the development of your blockchain app.

Arguments for the Go language:

• Simple and straightforward syntax. It makes writing efficient code a pleasure.
• Static typing. It avoids inattention errors, simplifies code reading and understanding, and makes efficient code unambiguous.
• A departure from OOP. There are no classes in the Go language, but there are data structures with methods.
• Parallelism. Parallel computing in a language is done simply, gracefully and without headaches.
• A rich standard library. The language has everything you need for full-stack web development and beyond.
• Ability to write in a functional style. Functions are first-order objects, they can be passed as arguments and used as data types.

Arguments against Go language

• Unobvious cycles “by value”.
• Questionable compiler severity.

Golang Language For Blockchain Coding

Go is a compiled language, so it reduces the on-the-fly error burden of interpreted languages such as Python. This is similar to C++, where code is compiled first, outputs an error and prompts for a fix, and then only executes.

Here is an example of using Golang language in the blockchain — GoCoin is a complete Bitcoin solution written in it. The software architecture is focused on maximum node performance and cold storage security of the wallet, and it is designed to be used offline.

Golang for blockchain was developed to be a language for creating various high-performance programs, but most programmers agree that it is best suited for developing web applications (as a back-end). At the same time, Go allows you to write other projects, such as Docker, InfluxDB and Kubernetes. Basically, the use of Go is limited to three main directions: networking software, console utilities and backend.

Rust vs Go: Which Is Better For Blockchain?

Below, we have gathered for you the 11 main Go vs Rust performance differences.

Wrapping Up

Since emerging in the same period of time, both languages are considered competitors of each other. Because of its versatility and advanced programming experience, Golang is well-known and quite popular, but on the other hand, Rust is much faster, which makes working in large teams more efficient and cost-effective. But the choice depends on you.

We can go deeper into both blockchain programming languages by analyzing the aspects of the Go vs. Rust comparison. But your choice between Rust and Go needs to be based on your development and business goals. As the competition continues, each language has its advantages and disadvantages. Contact us to select the best language for your future project.