So compared to Go, the Rust folks seemed to have paid close attention to the things people liked about Go. We have most of those things. We have great tooling, auto formatting, concurrency primitives (although we have freedom of choice. Green threads are a third party library, and aren't part of a runtime). We even have an animal mascot.

From a language standpoint, Go isn't anything remarkable (our Haskell colleague calls it a step backwards). If you listen to the Gotime podcast, Brad Fitzpatrick, one of the Go authors even says as much. Go's big contribution was essentially web programming and go routines.

Rust, on the other hand, has a lot. It has typeclasses from Haskell. It has lifetimes from the PL research community. It has immutability and pattern matching just like in Erlang. It has all the familiar control structure and enums/structs from C++.

Performance of Go in terms of CPU and memory pressure is usually somewhere near Java, if not slightly better. That's pretty damn good. The JVM has improved a lot over the years. Rust performance is a hair shy of C/C++. That's amazing. All those abstractions, and the speed of C++?