Rust vs. Go vs. Python: A Dev's Performance Showdown

In the world of software development, few topics stir up as much passionate debate as programming language performance. It’s the ultimate battle of benchmarks, where developers champion their favorite language and dissect every nanosecond of execution time. Recently, a developer on Reddit took this classic debate to the next level.

Driven by curiosity, they fell down the rabbit hole of a coding challenge and emerged with a fascinating cross-language performance shootout. The contenders? A diverse lineup including the systems programming titans Rust and Go, the functional powerhouse Haskell, the classic Lisp, and the web-development mainstays TypeScript and Python.

The Challenge: Hunting for Palindromes

The test wasn't some abstract algorithm but a well-known coding kata from Exercism: finding “palindromic products.”

A palindrome is a number that reads the same forwards and backwards, like 9009. The challenge is to find the smallest or largest palindrome that is the product of two numbers within a specific range (e.g., between 10 and 99).

It’s a simple-sounding problem that can quickly become computationally intensive, making it a perfect candidate for a performance benchmark.

Setting the Stage for a Language Duel

The developer meticulously implemented the solution in each language and pitted them against each other. This wasn't just about which language was “fastest”; it was a practical exploration of how different language philosophies, compilers, and runtimes tackle the same logical problem.

• Rust: Known for its focus on safety, zero-cost abstractions, and bare-metal performance.
• Go: Praised for its simplicity, concurrency, and fast compile times.
• Python & TypeScript: The versatile high-level languages that dominate web and data science. How would their interpreted or JIT-compiled nature hold up?
• Haskell & Lisp: Representatives from the functional and Lisp families, bringing unique paradigms to the table.

Why We Love a Good Benchmark

While a single micro-benchmark can't definitively crown one language as superior, these “shootouts” are incredibly valuable. They spark important conversations about trade-offs in software engineering—performance vs. developer productivity, memory safety vs. simplicity, and the power of different programming paradigms.

They push us to understand our tools better and often reveal surprising strengths and weaknesses in languages we thought we knew. The original Reddit thread, unsurprisingly, lit up with developers diving into the code, suggesting optimizations, and debating the results.

"I went way down the rabbit hole on a 'palindromic products' kata (from Exercism) and turned it into a cross-language performance shootout."

To see the full methodology and the final results, you can check out the original post and the lively discussion it generated. Which language do you think came out on top?