Rust, Go, or Zig? I've Debugged All Three at 3am

C++ is a fucking disaster and we all know it. Been writing it for way too long, watched it slowly kill the soul of every developer I know. Memory bugs crash production systems daily - I've been paged at 3am for segfaults more times than I can count. Build systems are complete shit. Template error messages that span 47 lines to tell you that you forgot a semicolon.

So three languages showed up claiming they could fix this trainwreck, each with their own brilliant theory:

Rust: "You're Too Stupid to Manage Memory"

Rust figured the problem is that C++ lets you shoot yourself in the face. Their solution? Make the compiler your condescending asshole coworker who questions every fucking thing you do.

Spent an entire weekend trying to get a simple HTTP client to compile. The borrow checker kept telling me I can't move this value because it's borrowed, can't borrow this because it's moved, can't breathe because oxygen is temporarily unavailable. Nearly threw my laptop out the window.

But... and I hate admitting this... once I finally got it working, that service ran for 6 months straight without a single memory-related crash. The bastard compiler was right.

Modern Rust is actually pretty solid. `cargo` is legitimately better than most package managers - doesn't randomly break like npm or take forever like CMake. Discord ditched Go for Rust when they needed stupid-fast latencies. Mozilla rewrote Firefox parts and saw way fewer security bugs.

The memory model prevents entire categories of crashes, but you'll suffer for every line of code until it clicks.

Go: "Simple Shit That Actually Works"

Go said fuck all that complexity. Google engineers got tired of waiting 45 minutes for C++ builds and dealing with template metaprogramming bullshit that nobody understands.

Go is boring as hell. Beautifully, productively boring. No generics for years (thank god they finally added them). No fancy features that make you feel smart but break production. Has a garbage collector like it's 1995. Systems programmers think it's beneath them.

I don't give a shit. Built multiple services handling stupid amounts of traffic with Go. Never got paged for memory leaks. Junior devs can contribute meaningful code in their first week instead of spending months learning arcane ownership rules.

Go keeps doing small, boring improvements that actually help instead of adding random shit nobody asked for. The standard library has everything you need. Goroutines make concurrent programming not suck for once. The scheduler handles thousands of goroutines without you having to think about it.

Google's data shows Go teams ship 40% faster than C++ teams. Not because Go is magic, but because you spend time solving business problems instead of fighting the language.

Zig: "What If C Wasn't Complete Garbage?"

Zig is the new kid who looked at Rust's academic wank and Go's hand-holding and said "what if we just fixed C without turning it into something unrecognizable?"

Still manual memory management because you're presumably an adult. But error messages that actually help instead of cryptic nonsense. Comptime evaluation that doesn't require a PhD. Cross-compilation that works without spending 3 hours setting up toolchains.

Bun rewrote a JS runtime in Zig and it's stupidly fast compared to Node.js. But here's the catch: Zig breaks your build every few months because they're still figuring out basic syntax. I've rewritten the same 200-line CLI tool 3 times because they keep changing how imports work.

If you're masochistic enough to stick with it until 1.0, might be decent. If you need to ship something this decade, maybe wait.

What You're Actually Choosing

This isn't about syntax or language features. You're picking your preferred flavor of suffering:

• Rust: Suffer for months learning it, then sleep well at night
• Go: Boring as shit but you'll ship features and go home on time
• Zig: All the fun of manual memory management plus the joy of constant breakage

Pick your poison. But enough philosophy - let's talk numbers because that's what your manager actually cares about. Time to see how these languages actually stack up when the rubber meets the road.

Benchmarks are mostly bullshit. Every language community cherry-picks the tests where their language wins. The Computer Language Benchmarks Game shows wildly different results depending on the test. But I've deployed all three in production, so here's what actually happens when your service goes down at 2am.

Rust: Fast as Hell, Expensive as Fuck

Rust is stupidly fast when you finally get it working. Built a log processing thing that handled... I dunno, maybe 500GB of logs per day? Hard to say exactly because the logs kept rotating and AWS CloudWatch is garbage. Memory stayed flat around 80MB, no spikes, no bullshit.

Discord's team migrated to Rust and saw crazy performance gains. Key word: team. They had multiple senior engineers. I was one idiot fighting the borrow checker alone at midnight.

Spent literally 2 weeks on borrow checker errors. Not learning the language - just trying to make one function compile. cannot borrow data as mutable because it is also borrowed as immutable became my fucking nemesis. What would take 10 minutes in Go required completely restructuring my approach in Rust.

Compile times are absolutely brutal. Clean build takes like 4 minutes on my decent machine. Same functionality in Go? 12 seconds. When production is on fire at 2am and you need to push a hotfix, waiting 4 minutes for compilation feels like eternity. Incremental compilation helps but you're still waiting way too long to see if your fix works.

Real numbers from my experience:

• CPU-intensive work: Within 5% of C performance
• Memory usage: Predictable, no spikes
• Build time: 5-10x slower than Go
• Development time: 3x longer than Go for first version

Go: Boringly Reliable

Go won't impress anyone at conferences, but it won't wake you up at 3am either. Had an API handling something like 25k requests/second on an AWS instance that cost too much money. Ran for weeks without drama. Memory hung around 3GB, GC pauses happened but didn't break anything.

Uber handles way more traffic than I do, but they've got actual infrastructure teams and I'm just one person with a credit card and some AWS instances.

The GC used to suck hard - remember 100ms pauses that would kill any real-time app. Modern Go is way better. I see GC pauses under 2ms even when memory usage gets ridiculous. Not great for high-frequency trading where microseconds matter, but perfect for normal web shit where users won't notice.

Here's the thing about Go: it's predictable. Performance doesn't degrade over time. No mysterious slowdowns. No surprises. The Go scheduler efficiently manages goroutines, and the runtime's adaptive GC keeps memory usage stable.

My production numbers:

• Web APIs: 80% of Rust performance, 10% of the development time
• Memory usage: Steady after startup, GC keeps it clean
• Binary size: Fucking huge (15MB for a simple service)
• Debugging: Easy as hell with built-in profiling

Zig: Fast But Breaks Everything

Ported some old C image processing code to Zig. Same performance as C but I could actually read the code afterwards. No GC overhead, no runtime surprises. Comptime lets you do zero-cost abstractions that make C look primitive.

Bun rewrote Node.js in Zig and it's way faster, but that's because Node.js is slow as shit, not because Zig has magical powers. TigerBeetle gets microsecond latencies with static allocation - pretty impressive.

But jesus christ, the constant breakage. Syntax changes every few months. My CLI tool has been rewritten 3 times not because I wanted to improve it, but because Zig kept changing how basic shit works. Maybe they'll stop breaking everything after 1.0. Maybe.

Realistic expectations:

• Speed: Same as C when you know what you're doing
• Memory footprint: Tiny (500KB binaries)
• Stability: Breaks every 6 months until 1.0
• Ecosystem: Good luck finding libraries

The Uncomfortable Truth About Performance

For 90% of software, it doesn't matter. Your API is waiting on the database. Your frontend is downloading JavaScript. Your mobile app is waiting for network requests. The biggest performance bottlenecks are rarely the language choice.

Where performance actually matters:

• Game engines: Use Rust or Zig
• High-frequency trading: Use Rust
• Web services: Go is fine, Rust if you hate yourself
• CLI tools: All three are fast enough
• Embedded: Rust or Zig, depending on your tolerance for pain

Pick the right tool for your problem and build something people actually use.

Performance benchmarks are just the appetizer. The real battle is fought in memory management - this is where these languages show their true colors and where you'll spend most of your debugging time at 3am.

Every systems programming argument eventually comes down to this: who's responsible when your program eats all the RAM and crashes? Microsoft's research shows 70% of security vulnerabilities are memory safety issues.

Rust: "You're Too Fucking Stupid for Pointers"

Rust assumes you're an idiot who will crash production with memory bugs. Honestly? Fair assumption. Spent way too many nights debugging segfaults in C++, watching valgrind tell me about double-frees in code that "should totally work."

Rust's solution: make the compiler the most annoying coworker you've ever had. It questions every pointer, every reference, every attempt to do anything remotely clever. The ownership system prevents crashes, but at the cost of your sanity.

fn process_data(data: Vec<String>) -> Vec<String> {
    data.into_iter()
        .filter(|s| !s.is_empty())
        .map(|s| s.to_uppercase())
        .collect()
    // Compiler guarantees no memory leaks
}

Reality check: you'll spend your first month screaming at the borrow checker. I spent 4 hours on a function that parses JSON and updates a hashmap. In Go it would've been 10 minutes. But the compiler kept yelling about "cannot borrow as mutable because it's also borrowed as immutable" until I wanted to punch my screen.

Mozilla rewrote Firefox stuff in Rust and saw fewer crashes, so apparently the pain is worth it. Eventually.

But here's the thing: once you finally get Rust code to compile, it doesn't randomly crash. Ever. That service I mentioned? Ran for 8 months straight without a single memory-related restart. No segfaults waking me up at 3am. No weird crashes under load.

Microsoft is adopting Rust in Windows kernel to eliminate memory safety bugs. Turns out the compiler's paranoia actually prevents real problems.

Go: "Fuck It, The GC Will Handle It"

Go's approach: "Look, most of you suck at memory management. We're just gonna clean up your mess automatically." The Go team prioritizes getting shit done over maximum performance.

func processData(data []string) []string {
    var result []string
    for _, item := range data {
        if len(item) > 0 {
            result = append(result, strings.ToUpper(item))
        }
    }
    return result
    // GC cleans up automatically
}

The GC used to be absolute trash. Early versions had 100ms pauses that would wreck any app that needed consistent performance. Remember when Go services would just... freeze... for a tenth of a second randomly? Fun times.

Modern Go is way better. GC pauses under 2ms even when memory usage gets stupid. Not perfect for high-frequency trading where every microsecond counts, but fine for normal web services where users won't notice.

Trade-off is worth it though. Junior devs can't create memory leaks even if they try. Services don't randomly crash from buffer overflows. You ship features instead of debugging ownership semantics. Google's teams deliver stuff 40% faster with Go than C++.

Zig: "You're an Adult, Figure It Out"

Zig assumes you're not a complete moron but recognizes that C's tools are garbage. You still manage memory manually, but at least the language helps you not completely fuck it up. The allocator design is explicit, and defer statements prevent the obvious resource leaks.

fn processData(allocator: std.mem.Allocator, data: [][]const u8) ![][]u8 {
    var result = std.ArrayList([]u8).init(allocator);
    defer result.deinit(); // This line prevents leaks

    for (data) |item| {
        if (item.len > 0) {
            const upper = try std.ascii.allocUpperString(allocator, item);
            try result.append(upper);
        }
    }
    return result.toOwnedSlice();
}

The `defer` statement is actually brilliant - cleanup happens when the function ends, guaranteed. Ported some old C code to Zig and defer caught memory leaks that I'd been living with for months. It's like RAII but you can actually understand what's happening.

Downside: if you're clueless about memory management, Zig will let you create spectacular disasters. Watched a junior dev create a memory leak that consumed 16GB of RAM in 30 seconds because they didn't understand allocators. Zig docs assume you already know this shit from C.

What This Actually Costs You

This isn't just about performance - it's about how much of your life you want to spend debugging SIGSEGV at 3am. CVE databases show memory bugs dominate security vulnerabilities. Your choice of memory management directly impacts how often you get woken up by Slack alerts.

Rust Tax

High learning curve, slow initial development, but bulletproof production code. Worth it if you're building critical infrastructure or can't afford downtime. Linux kernel adoption proves its value for system-critical code.

Go Tax

Slightly higher memory usage and GC pauses, but you ship features 3x faster and sleep well at night. Perfect for web services and business applications. PayPal's success story shows the productivity gains.

Zig Tax

Maximum performance, but you need experienced developers who won't shoot themselves in the foot. Good luck hiring them. The Zig community is small but growing.

Pick your poison based on your team's experience and pain tolerance. Think about developer time, not just CPU cycles.

After surviving the memory management battles, you're probably wondering about the real-world shit that matters. Here are the honest answers to the questions everyone actually asks when choosing a systems language - no bullshit, just what you need to know before you commit.