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I would say that Rust and Go started in a similar space, but diverged over time, with Go finding a higher-level, less strict niche and Rust finding a lower-level, stricter niche. In retrospect this seems completely unsurprising, with the development team of Go primarily targeting servers and the development team of Rust primarily targeting Web browser engines (though, as both are general-purpose languages, they can be used in many niches, and plenty of people are productive with e.g. emulators in Go and servers in Rust).



Personally I find Rust to be a much higher level language than Go, though I understand this is a bit of a weird case since it also involves manual memory management to some degree.

In terms of “feeling”, Go feels like a polished form of C to me. Rust doesn’t feel like C++ to me — it actually feels much more like OCaml and even Haskell. Though Haskel no doubt has a more sophisticated type system, I still find that a shocking number of design practices that I used in Haskell port naturally to Rust.


The original Rust compiler was written in OCaml, and OCaml was one of the chief design inspirations for the language. The similarities between Rust and ML-like languages is no coincidence.




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