I think Go might be a better choice but not for that reason at all.
Go could implement something like this with no dependencies outside the standard library. It would make sense to take on a few, but a comparable Rust project would have at least several dozens.
Also, Go can deliver a single binary that works on every Linux distribution right out of the box. In Rust, its possible but you have to static compile with muslc and that is a far less well-trodden path with some significant differences to the glibc that most Rust libraries have been tested with.
My personal opinion is that I like Rust much more than Go, but I can’t deny that Rust is a big, and more dauntingly to newcomers, pretty unopinionated language compared to Go.
There are more syntax features, more and more complex semantics, and while rustc and clippy do a great job of explaining like 90% of errors, the remaining 10% suuuuuck.
There’s also some choices imposed by the build system (like cargo allowing multiple versions of the same dep in a workspace) and by the macro system (axum has some unintuitive extractor ordering needs that you won’t find unless you know to look for them), and those things and the hurdles they present become intuitive after a time but just while getting started? Oof
LLMs should know that, for maybe a CRUD app, there should be taken care of security at various layers, i.e. input validation in controllers. Knowledge from popular frameworks that communicate security boundaries should be transferable for them, even if everything is custom code. Very confusing to me how they manage to completely ignore so much of it. I guess they are too good following suit of a productivity minded vibe coder.
Frankly I don't think one even needs to learn it, if you know a bunch of other languages and the codebase is good. I was able to just make a useful change to an open source project by just doing it, without having written any lines of Go before. Granted the MR needed some revisions.
Rust is my favorite, though. There are values beyond ease of contribution. I can't replicate the experience with a Rust project anymore, but I suspect it would have been tougher.
agents don't really care and they're doing anywhere between 90-100% of the work on CC. if anything, rust is better as it has more built-in verification out of the box.
Rust is accessible to everyone now that Claude Code and Opus can emit it at a high proficiency level.
Rust is designed so the error handling is ergonomic and fits into the flow of the language and the type system. Rust code will be lower defect rate by default.
Plus it's faster and doesn't have a GC.
You can use Rust now even if you don't know the language. It's the best way to start learning Rust.
The learning curve is not as bad as people say. It's really gentle.
