I've used all three for different projects over the past couple years. Here's what I've learned.
Rust: Powerful When It Works
Rust is genuinely impressive once you understand it. The problem is understanding it feels like learning vim - everything seems backwards until suddenly it clicks and you can't imagine coding without it.
I spent way too long fighting the borrow checker on what should have been straightforward code. The compiler errors are technically correct but often unhelpful - "cannot borrow *self.inner as mutable because it is also borrowed as immutable" doesn't tell you how to actually fix your goddamn code. Spent 3 hours on what should have been a 10-minute struct update.
When you get it right though, the reliability is impressive. Our Rust API has been up for 8 months straight - the only outage was when I deployed on a Friday and forgot to update the connection pool size. Rookie mistake, but at least it wasn't a memory leak eating all our RAM like the old Java service.
The async runtime can still panic and bypass all your compile-time safety. Learned this the hard way when our user auth service went down because some HTTP client panicked inside a Future. All that fighting with the borrow checker, and the runtime still lost its shit.
Performance-wise, Rust consistently outperforms most languages in benchmarks like the Computer Language Benchmarks Game, typically running within 10-20% of C++ speeds while providing memory safety guarantees.
The ownership system is genuinely innovative, but it takes time to internalize. Check out the Rust by Example for practical ownership patterns and the Rustonomicon when you need to understand unsafe code.
Compile times are slower than watching paint dry. Clean builds take so long you can make coffee, check Slack, and contemplate your life choices. `cargo check` helps during development, but touching anything in your core types triggers rebuilds of half your dependency tree. On a MacBook Air? Forget it - thermal throttling makes it 3x worse.
Go: Boring and Reliable
Go is boring as hell, but boring means I go home on time instead of debugging memory corruption at midnight.
Memory safety in Go comes through garbage collection, which means automatic memory management but at the cost of GC pauses. Unlike Rust's compile-time guarantees or manual management in C/C++, Go handles memory safety at runtime.
New developers pick it up quickly. Even junior devs can be productive within a couple weeks. The language is simple by design - there aren't many ways to do the same thing, so codebases stay consistent even when you have 8 different people contributing.
Built-in concurrency with goroutines actually works as advertised. The Go memory model is well-documented and the race detector catches most threading issues during testing. For understanding performance characteristics, check out Dave Cheney's performance guide.
The garbage collector will bite you during traffic spikes. Our Black Friday sale brought response times from 50ms to 300ms because of GC pauses. Setting GOGC=50 helped but doubled our memory usage - classic time/space tradeoff that you'll spend a week tuning.
Error handling is verbose:
result, err := doThing()
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
// Repeat everywhere
But when something breaks, the stack trace usually points you in the right direction. You're not digging through layers of abstractions to figure out what went wrong.
The module system was a disaster before Go 1.13. The proxy and checksum database caused weird failures until 1.16 finally stabilized things. Now it just works, which is more than you can say for most package managers.
Zig: Interesting Ideas, Not Ready Yet
Zig has some clever concepts. Comptime is actually innovative - it's like C++ templates but actually usable. The C interoperability works really well and compile times are fast when comptime doesn't go haywire.
Zig takes a minimal approach to systems programming - no hidden memory allocations, no runtime overhead, and explicit error handling. It aims to be a better C, not a safer Rust alternative.
The Zig compiler can cross-compile to basically anything, and the build system is refreshingly simple compared to CMake hell. Check out Loris Cro's blog for practical Zig insights.
But it's still pre-1.0 and acts like it. Code from 0.9.x won't compile on 0.10.x. The standard library changes every release. Package management is "just use git submodules" which is as fun as it sounds. I tried using it for a project and spent more time fixing breaking changes than writing features.
The error messages are usually helpful, but the documentation has gaps the size of the Grand Canyon. The ecosystem is minimal - good luck finding an HTTP client that doesn't depend on one guy's abandoned weekend project.
I'd wait for 1.0 before using Zig for anything important. The ideas are sound but the stability isn't there yet.
What I Actually Recommend
Go is your best bet unless you have specific reasons to choose something else. It's not exciting, but you'll ship features and sleep at night.
Rust is worth the pain if you're building something where crashes mean losing data or money. Just don't underestimate how long it takes to become productive - budget 6+ months for your team.
Zig will waste your time until 1.0 drops. The ideas are great, but being a beta tester for a programming language sucks when you have deadlines.