Step-by-step articles on Systems Languages, part of our Programming Languages collection.
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Rust is a compiled language that gives you C-level performance with memory safety guaranteed by the compiler, without a garbage collector. It powers parts of web browsers, operating systems, cloud infrastructure and a growing share of developer tooling. Where...
Go is a small, compiled language designed at Google for building reliable server software. Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and many cloud tools are written in it. Its appeal is simplicity: a small language, fast builds, a single static binary and great built-in...
Ownership is the idea that makes Rust memory-safe without a garbage collector. It comes down to three rules and two kinds of references. The three ownership rules Each value has exactly one owner (a variable). When the owner goes out of scope, the value is dro...
A goroutine is a lightweight thread managed by the Go runtime. You can run hundreds of thousands of them. Channels let goroutines pass data safely. Start goroutines and wait for them var wg sync.WaitGroup urls := []string{"https://go.dev", "https://pkg.go.dev"...
Rust has no exceptions. Functions that can fail return Result<T, E> , and the compiler makes sure you deal with the error case. Result and match use std::fs; match fs::read_to_string("config.toml") { Ok(text) => println!("{} bytes", text.len()), Err(e) => epri...
In Go, errors are ordinary values returned alongside results. The pattern is repetitive by design: it keeps every failure path visible. The basic pattern f, err := os.Open("config.json") if err != nil { return fmt.Errorf("open config: %w", err) } defer f.Close...
Rust's enums are far more powerful than enums in most languages: each variant can hold its own data. Combined with match , they let you model states so that invalid ones can't exist. Structs and impl #[derive(Debug, Clone)] struct User { id: u64, name: String,...
Go developers used to reach for a router package as soon as they needed path parameters. Since Go 1.22, the standard http.ServeMux supports HTTP methods and wildcards, which covers most APIs. The server package main import ( "encoding/json" "log" "net/http" "s...
A trait defines behaviour that types can implement, similar to an interface. Generics let functions work with any type that implements the traits they need. Defining and implementing a trait trait Notifier { fn send(&self, to: &str, message: &str) -> Result<()...
Generics arrived in Go 1.18. They let you write functions and types that work for many types while staying type-safe, without falling back to interface{} and type assertions. A generic function func Map[T, U any](items []T, fn func(T) U) []U { out := make([]U,...
Async Rust lets one thread handle thousands of network connections. Rust provides async / await syntax; a runtime such as Tokio actually runs the futures. Setup [dependencies] tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] } reqwest = { version = "0.12", feature...
A context.Context carries a cancellation signal and an optional deadline through a chain of function calls. When a user closes the browser tab, every database query and HTTP call made for that request can stop. Every request already has one func handleSearch(w...
Axum is a popular Rust web framework from the Tokio team. Handlers are plain async functions, and "extractors" in their parameters pull data out of the request in a type-safe way. Dependencies [dependencies] axum = "0.8" tokio = { version = "1", features = ["f...
Go's testing tools are built in: no framework to choose. Tests live next to the code in _test.go files. Table-driven tests // slug_test.go func TestSlugify(t *testing.T) { tests := []struct { name, in, want string }{ {"simple", "Hello World", "hello-world"}, {...
Cargo is Rust's build tool and package manager. It's one of the best parts of the language, and a few features make a big difference in real projects. Everyday commands cargo new myapp # binary project (--lib for a library) cargo add serde --features derive ca...
A Go module is a collection of packages versioned together, defined by a go.mod file at its root. go.mod module github.com/acme/shop go 1.25 require ( github.com/jackc/pgx/v5 v5.7.1 golang.org/x/sync v0.10.0 ) Everyday commands go mod init github.com/acme/shop...
Iterators are how idiomatic Rust processes collections. They read like a pipeline and compile down to code as fast as a hand-written loop. The basics let prices = vec![499, 1299, 250, 3999]; let affordable: Vec<u32> = prices .iter() // borrow each item .filter...
Since Go 1.23, for range can loop over functions . This gives Go a standard way to write iterators for custom data structures, database rows or paginated APIs. The iterator types // package iter type Seq[V any] func(yield func(V) bool) type Seq2[K, V any] func...
Rust evolves in small releases every six weeks, plus occasional editions that bundle changes which would otherwise break existing code. The 2024 edition shipped with Rust 1.85 in early 2025. Editions don't split the ecosystem Each crate picks its edition in Ca...
Plain text logs are hard to search at scale. Structured logs attach key-value fields to each message, so you can filter by user_id or status in your log platform. Go's standard library includes log/slog for this. Getting started import ( "log/slog" "os" ) func...
