What It Actually Costs to Choose Rust vs Go

So I've tried hiring Rust developers at three different companies now. Each time I thought "okay, NOW I know what I'm doing." Each time I got financially fucked in new and exciting ways.

The Salary Explosion That Caught Me Off Guard

February 2022, middle of the crypto hiring frenzy, posted a Rust position for $130K thinking that was solid money in Austin. Got exactly 7 applications in 8 weeks. The few legit candidates all demanded $160K+ base plus 0.5% equity, delivering PowerPoints about "memory safety revolution" bullshit.

Same company, same month, posted a Go backend position for $125K. 52 applications in two weeks. About 25 were actually qualified senior devs, not bootcamp grads who copied async/await from Stack Overflow.

Those PayScale averages showing Rust developers make like $112K? Complete fucking fantasy. Anyone who's actually decent at Rust gets poached by crypto companies or AI startups for way more. I know because I keep getting outbid by Coinbase offering $220K base.

Go devs are still expensive but at least they exist. Rust job postings are way up but there's maybe 8 good developers for every 100 openings. Go is more like 3-4 qualified people per opening, which makes a massive difference when you're trying to actually hire someone.

The Training Nightmare (AKA Why Senior Engineers Quit)

Trying to transition Go developers to Rust broke some of my best people. Not exaggerating.

What actually happens when you try to teach Rust to working developers:

First month using Rust 1.68.2 was absolute hell. Senior developers with 8+ years suddenly can't compile fn main() { let s = String::from("hello"); println!("{}", s.len()); } because of some moved value bullshit.

Had one guy debugging a payment service for 6 hours straight because he kept getting error[E0507]: cannot move out of borrowed content on what should've been a simple string parse. Found him at 3am, laptop still showing 47 compile errors, staring at the screen like he'd seen some shit. Turns out he needed .to_string() instead of trying to return &str from the function. Six. Fucking. Hours.

One junior dev quit after 4 months when he couldn't fix error[E0515]: cannot return reference to temporary value in our auth middleware. Left a note saying Rust's compiler was "gaslighting" him with error messages that made no sense. Honestly? Not wrong.

Eventually senior devs figure out how to make shit compile, but their code is .clone() and .unwrap() spam everywhere because screw fighting the borrow checker for 3 hours over a simple data structure. At least the damn thing builds.

If they stick with it for like 6+ months, they finally start writing decent Rust. Problem is, most don't make it that far.

I budgeted maybe $5K per developer for training - books, courses, Udemy shit, whatever. Actual cost was more like $25K when you factor in lost productivity, me spending 20 hours a week explaining why basic operations don't work, and the general "why did we do this to ourselves" depression.

Junior developers were even worse. Spent a ton of money on a couple bootcamp grads thinking they'd pick it up faster. Six months later they still couldn't understand why simple string operations don't work. Both quit complaining about lifetime parameters.

When Your Rust Dev Leaves, You're Fucked

At my last company, our lead Rust dev got poached by Solana Labs in October 2023. $190K to $280K jump plus 0.8% equity. Gave his standard two weeks notice, seemed totally reasonable until we realized he was literally the only person who understood our async WebSocket connection pool and all those custom derive macros he'd written.

Took 9 goddamn months to find a replacement. Meanwhile we're paying this consultant from Berlin $375/hour just to keep our message queue from completely shitting itself. Dude would be answering 2am production alerts from his timezone, billing us minimum 30-minute increments for "quick fixes" that were usually just adding .await somewhere or changing Arc<T> to Arc<Mutex<T>>.

Cost was brutal - consultant fees, recruiting fees for specialized Rust headhunters, and the stress of running a service nobody on the team really understood.

What the Rust hiring market actually looks like:

Posted on every job board we could find. Got maybe a dozen resumes over several months. Half were obviously bullshit - people claiming 10+ years Rust experience when the language has only been stable for 8 years total.

The few real candidates either wanted absurd money for remote work ($200K+ base for mid-level), or they were actually good but wanted to work on "exciting blockchain projects" instead of our boring payment processing software.

Had one guy join and then rage-quit after a month because our code wasn't "idiomatic" enough for him. Apparently we were using too many Arc<Mutex<T>> instead of channels or some shit. Thanks for the feedback, dickhead.

Meanwhile when we needed to replace Go developers? Posted on Tuesday, hired by Friday. Rust developers are all working for crypto companies or big tech now. Hard to compete with those offers.

Go: The Language That Doesn't Make Me Want to Drink

Go hiring is wonderfully boring:

Why Go actually works for hiring:

Post a Go job on Monday, you'll have tons of qualified applications by Wednesday. Take any decent backend developer and they're shipping code in a few weeks.

Salaries are predictable - nobody's trying to poach your Go developers with 2x market rate offers. Every major city has Go developers. Hell, even smaller cities have them.

When your Go developer quits, you can replace them before they've even finished their exit interview.

Go's boring simplicity means no weird tribal knowledge. Junior developers can read senior developer code without having a mental breakdown about lifetimes and ownership. With Rust, junior developers look at generic trait bounds and immediately start updating their LinkedIn.

Never had a Go developer rage-quit because the language was "fighting them." Can't say the same about Rust - had a couple people quit in the middle of sprints because they couldn't get async lifetimes working in some WebSocket code we had.

The Real Numbers (From My Pain)

Here's roughly what I spent building teams at different companies:

Rust Team (5 developers):

• Salaries: Had to pay way more, like $150K-$190K range because crypto companies kept outbidding us
• Took 18 months to fully staff because people kept declining offers
• Two developers quit during training, had to restart hiring for those positions
• Training costs were fucking brutal - lost productivity, my time explaining basic shit, $3K in courses nobody finished
• Total year one: $950K (and that's with positions vacant for months)

Go Team (5 developers, same timeframe):

• Salaries: Way more reasonable, $120K-$145K range
• Fully staffed in 4 months
• Nobody quit during training
• Training costs were minimal - people actually picked it up
• Total year one: $700K

So we're talking $250K difference per year. Every goddamn year. For a web app that does the exact same thing regardless of what language runs it.

The salary gap is probably worse now with all the AI companies hiring up systems programmers.

When Rust Actually Pays For Itself (Spoiler: Rarely)

Rust makes sense in specific situations:

Choose Rust when:

• Performance directly impacts revenue - trading systems, gaming engines, real-time stuff
• Memory bugs are costing you more than developer salaries
• You're already at massive scale where infrastructure costs matter more than people costs
• You have a long runway and can afford months-long hiring processes
• Your team already knows systems programming

Don't choose Rust because:

• You read some blog post about how Discord saved money (you're not Discord)
• You think it'll make hiring easier (it definitely won't)
• Your Go app feels "slow" (fix your database queries first)
• You want to learn something new (do that on your own time)

For most web apps and SaaS products, Go's boring efficiency beats Rust's theoretical performance advantages. Rust math only works when microsecond differences actually generate revenue.

Additional Resources and References

• Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey - Comprehensive developer compensation data
• JetBrains Developer Ecosystem 2024 - Technology adoption and salary trends
• Rust Learning Resources - Official learning path for Rust developers
• Go Getting Started Guide - Official Go tutorial and documentation
• Rust vs Go Performance Benchmarks - Real-world performance comparisons
• GitHub Language Statistics - Language popularity trends
• Rust Foundation Website - Official Rust governance and funding information
• Go Development at Google - How Google uses Go in production
• Rust Success Stories - Real-world Rust implementation examples
• Developer Hiring Trends 2024 - Comprehensive hiring market analysis

Everyone talks about Rust's "50% infrastructure savings" and "zero garbage collection overhead." Most of this is marketing bullshit from people trying to justify rewriting perfectly functional software. Here's what actually happened to my AWS bill.

The Performance Reality

Yeah, Rust is faster than Go. But not by nearly as much as all those benchmarks suggest, and better performance doesn't always mean cost savings.

Last company had this options trading API handling 850K requests/second during market hours. Migration from Go 1.19.3 to Rust 1.68.2 took 8.5 months of dev hell:

• CPU usage: 18% better on AWS c5.2xlarge instances, but we also blew $15K on consultants optimizing our async runtime during the rewrite
• Memory usage: Dropped from 2.1GB to 1.4GB per instance, though we also ditched our garbage in-memory cache implementation
• Latency: P99 went from 47ms to 34ms, but we also upgraded to 10Gbps networking and fixed our shitty database connection pooling, so who knows what actually made it faster

Decent improvements. But nowhere near the "2x faster" claims you hear from Rust people. More like "noticeably better if you look at the graphs closely."

AWS Bill Reality Check

Here's roughly what that migration ended up costing:

Go version (Go 1.19.3):

• 8x c5.2xlarge instances ($0.34/hour = $1,958/month)
• RDS PostgreSQL db.r5.2xlarge ($0.50/hour = $360/month)
• ALB, CloudWatch, misc AWS garbage: ~$890/month
• Total: $3,208/month

Rust version (Rust 1.68.2):

• 6x c5.2xlarge instances: $1,468/month
• Same RDS costs: $360/month
• Sentry for Rust error tracking: $89/month (DataDog didn't handle Rust panics well)
• GitHub Actions compute time tripled: +$127/month
• Rust-specific APM tools: $143/month
• Total: $2,187/month... wait, that's not right

Took 4 more months of optimization hell before we actually saw the promised savings. Initial Rust version was poorly written async code that used more memory than the Go version.

Wait, what the hell? We actually spent MORE after the migration when you counted everything. The compute savings got completely eaten up by longer CI builds and all the specialized monitoring tools we had to buy because normal ones don't handle Rust properly.

The infrastructure savings didn't show up until months later, after we burned another $20K on consultants to optimize our async code and unfuck our deployment process.

Where Rust Actually Saves Money

Rust's cost benefits are real in specific situations:

Memory-heavy stuff: Processing huge files (like multi-gigabyte financial data dumps) is where Go's garbage collector becomes a real problem. We'd see 5-15 second pauses during heavy allocation periods. Rust handles this smoothly.

Predictable performance: No garbage collection means no surprise CPU spikes. We could reduce our buffer capacity because performance was more consistent.

Database connections: Rust's lower memory overhead meant we needed fewer database connection pools. Since cloud providers charge per connection after certain limits, this actually saves money at scale.

Where Rust Costs More

Build infrastructure: GitHub Actions bill went way up. Newer Rust versions compile a bit faster, but large projects still need bigger build servers. Go builds are way cheaper to run.

Had one project break completely when we upgraded Rust versions - some breaking change in the async stuff. Took a few days to fix.

Deployment complexity: Rust binaries are statically linked which is nice for Docker, but production panics are absolutely fucking useless. Stack traces show 0x7f8b8c0a1234 instead of actual function names. Ended up paying $143/month for Sentry's Rust SDK just to get readable crash reports.

Operational overhead: Go panics tell you exactly what's wrong: panic: runtime error: index out of range [5] with length 3. Rust production panics look like thread 'tokio-runtime-worker' panicked at 'called Result::unwrap() on an Err value: Os { code: 13, kind: PermissionDenied, message: "Permission denied" } at some memory address that tells you absolutely nothing useful.

Spent 3 hours at 2am debugging what turned out to be a file permission issue on log rotation. Would have taken 30 seconds in Go. Ended up calling that $375/hour Berlin consultant again.

The Garbage Collection Tax Is Real

Go's garbage collector does cost money, but it's not dramatic:

• GC pauses: 1-10ms every few seconds
• CPU overhead: ~5-10% during collection cycles
• Memory overhead: ~10-20% due to allocation patterns

For most applications, this translates to maybe 15-20% over-provisioning. Real cost, but not catastrophic.

Scale Matters (A Lot)

Small applications (< 1M requests/day):
Infrastructure differences are noise. Developer salaries dominate costs. Go wins easily.

Medium applications (1-50M requests/day):
This is where Rust starts paying off. Our savings hit $500-2000/month, which offsets some of the developer cost premium.

Large applications (>50M requests/day):
Real money. At this scale, 20-30% infrastructure savings means thousands per month. Plus, performance predictability becomes crucial for SLAs.

The Build Time Tax

Rust's compile times hurt more than people admit:

• Developer productivity drops 10-15% waiting for builds
• CI/CD costs increase 2-3x
• Hot fixes take longer (could be 20 minutes vs 2 minutes for Go)

One startup calculated this cost them $40K annually in developer productivity and CI infrastructure. Still worth it for their use case, but it's not free.

When Infrastructure Savings Actually Matter

Rust infrastructure benefits kick in when:

• High throughput: >10M requests/day minimum
• Memory intensive: Processing large datasets or holding significant state
• Latency sensitive: Sub-100ms P99 requirements where GC pauses hurt
• Long-running: Services that stay up for months without restarts

Bottom Line on Infrastructure

For most web applications, infrastructure savings are nice but not decisive. The real money is in developer salaries and time-to-market.

If you're processing millions of requests and need consistent performance, Rust can save meaningful money. If you're building a typical CRUD app, the infrastructure differences won't cover the developer cost premium.

Don't choose Rust for infrastructure costs unless you're already at significant scale.

Technical Performance Resources

• Rust Performance Profiling Guide - Advanced optimization techniques
• Go Memory Management Best Practices - Understanding garbage collection impact
• Benchmarking Rust Applications - Official benchmarking documentation
• Go Performance Tuning - Performance optimization workshop
• Systems Programming with Rust - Official Rust systems programming guide

Infrastructure Cost Analysis:

• AWS Calculator - Actually calculate your infrastructure costs
• Rust Performance Book - Real optimization techniques
• Go Memory Management - Understanding GC impact
• TechEmpower Benchmarks - Language performance comparisons
• GitHub Actions Pricing - Calculate CI/CD costs
• Sentry Rust SDK - Error tracking and performance monitoring
• DataDog Go Tracing - Go application monitoring
• Discord Rust Performance - Real-world Rust adoption case study