Of course, if you're comparing with Go, you need to compare apples to apples - since Go doesn't have ownership tracking, the equivalent Rust would necessarily have to be unsafe.

Yeah but Go has garbage collection. Rust's ownership model makes up for not having GC.

I think that heap-allocating everything and using Rc<T> and Weak<T> would be a closer comparison to what Go does, than using idiomatic Rust with borrow-checked locals etc.