In terms of RPS, this web service is more-or-less the fortunes benchmark in the techempower benchmarks, once the data hits the cache: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

Or, at least, they would be after applying optimizations to them.

In short, both of these would serve more rps than you will likely ever need on even the lowest end virtual machines. The underlying API provider will probably cut you off from querying them before you run out of RPS.

Author here. It took me about 2 hours to code the Go service and maybe 4 to do the Rust part. The reason why Rust took longer was mainly because of the better error handling and the few more higher level abstractions. I could have added unwraps everywhere to get about the same experience, but yeah.

Honest question: how does "better error handling" cause the implementation time to increase?

Better error handling in the final result.