[jstx1]

> they do not target the same problems and they aren't competing languages.

Is this really true? All the problems that are solvable in Go should be solvable in Rust too right (but not vice versa because Go is GCed)? They might not compete on every front but there definitely should be overlap in the use cases.

[toolz]

There is a ton of overlap with every general purpose programming language. So it's correct to say you can solve the vast majority of problems with the majority of programming languages, but languages differentiate themselves in many different ways. One of the main differences between rust and go is that go is a garbage collected language. That feature alone typically creates a large divide in what languages are trying to achieve.

[jstx1]

I feel like you’re ignoring my point. The GC prevents Go from competing with Rust on some use cases. But that still leaves a lot of overlap of potential use cases and if your work falls in that region of use cases, you get to pick between the two languages (and a bunch of others too).

[toolz]

I feel like I covered the fact that there's a large overlap between most languages, but to clarify more - when a software team chooses a language they aren't choosing a language based on the overlap, they are choosing it based on the language specific features they think will benefit them the most across the problems they most often try to solve. Go and rusts unique features do no compete with each other like rust/c++ would or like go/elixir (which I feel these two languages are much more comparable in the problems they focus on solving.

Go generally targets small microservices and can be quite limiting (imho) to larger projects because the language semantics are extremely simple and are not geared towards projects with numerous business domains.

Rust on the other hand has extremely powerful generics which enable sophisticated code sharing and composition to enable large projects. Rust also very purposefully targets embedded systems and low level systems programming. You can do these things in go, but it is not something the language is designed to do as a first class priority.