Zig, Rust, Go?! I tried 3 low-level languages and here’s what I’m sticking with

Opinionated, nerdy, perfect for system devs and hacker crowds. Viral potential: high.

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Zig, Rust, Go the low-level languages

1. The low-level showdown

I got tired of pretending C++ still makes sense in 2025. So I did what any system nerd with too many terminal tabs would do I went language shopping. Specifically, I went deep into three low-level, “bare metal but modern” contenders: Zig, Rust, and Go.

I wasn’t just benchmarking Fibonacci numbers or reading Hacker News threads. I actually built small projects, CLI tools, web backends, and poked around the guts of each ecosystem to see what stuck.

The goal? Find a language that lets me stay close to the metal without slicing my fingers off on raw pointers or losing my sanity to esoteric compiler tantrums.

Spoiler: I walked in expecting one winner, and walked out with a completely different favorite.

If you write code that needs to be fast, safe, and under your control or if you’re the kind of person who reads compiler release notes for fun you’ll want to keep reading.

Table of contents:

1. The low-level showdown
2. What Zig brought to the table
3. Rust: The dragon everyone’s talking about
4. Go: The boring genius of the group
5. So… what am I actually using?
6. Other devs say…
7. Resources if you’re choosing between them
8. Final thoughts: Choose your weapon

What Zig brought to the table

Zig feels like someone looked at C, removed everything dangerous, and then replaced it with better design… while still giving you full control. It’s aggressively minimal and I mean that as both a compliment and a warning.

There’s no hidden control flow, no garbage collector, no surprise memory allocation. You write exactly what runs. In a world of abstracted everything, Zig is like a Swiss Army knife: sharp, compact, and dangerously effective if you know how to use it.

What I liked:

• Compile times are insanely fast. Even on my older Linux laptop, builds were near-instant. No bloated build chain nonsense.
• Cross-compilation is basically a first-class citizen. Want to build for Windows from Linux? Easy. No Docker hacks or Makefile witchcraft.
• C interop is stupidly simple. You can literally @cImport a header and go. Perfect for embedded devs or people gluing modern logic onto legacy C code.

Also, there’s something beautiful about the clarity of Zig code. It’s like C, but with bounds checking, optional types, and real syntax sanity. And error handling with try and catch actually feels readable.

But the pain is real:

• The ecosystem is still growing. There’s no batteries included. You’ll be writing your own HTTP parsers or hunting through unmaintained libraries.
• Debugging is rough. Tooling isn’t as mature as Rust or Go you’ll spend more time in lldb or printing variables than you'd like to admit.
• Documentation is hit or miss. The language itself is moving fast, so tutorials and examples are often out of date.

Zig rewards the hacker mindset. It doesn’t hold your hand. If you’re building something deeply embedded, a kernel, or a custom OS loader Zig is thrilling. For quick backend APIs or full-stack apps? Probably not ready yet.

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Rust: The dragon everyone’s talking about

Rust is what happens when academics and systems devs agree that safety and performance should get along then build a whole new language to prove it. If Zig is the sharp minimalist blade, Rust is a full-on battle axe… forged by a type system and tempered in fire by the borrow checker.

Everyone hypes Rust. And honestly? A lot of it is justified.

What blew my mind:

• Zero-cost abstractions that actually feel zero. Traits, lifetimes, iterators once you get them, you realize you’re writing high-level logic with C-like speed.
• Cargo is straight-up dev magic. It handles dependencies, building, testing, and documentation like a boss. You’ll miss it the moment you go back to something else.

The ecosystem is rich and growing fast:

• Tokio for async
• Bevy for game dev
• Axum for APIs
• Serde for serialization

And the compiler? Yeah, it yells at you. But it wants you to succeed. Every time it stops you, it’s because you were about to do something dumb. Rust makes bugs harder to write.

The reality check:

• Learning Rust is a process. You will spend hours wrestling with the borrow checker, mutability rules, and lifetimes. This is not a “weekend project” language.
• Error messages are essays. Very helpful essays, but still. Prepare for your terminal to feel like a college textbook sometimes.
• Code can get… verbose. Especially if you’re writing generics-heavy or macro-heavy stuff. Sometimes you feel like you’re writing Rust for the compiler, not for humans.

Rust shines in performance-critical or security-sensitive work. Think systems programming, cryptography, OS-level work, or high-scale networking. If you’ve got time to learn and need reliability that compiles, Rust’s worth it.

Go: The boring genius of the group

If Zig is a stripped-down katana and Rust is a flaming warhammer, then Go is a perfectly balanced wrench set. Not exciting, not flashy but gets the job done without complaining.

Go was built at Google to solve Google-sized problems. It’s designed for clarity, speed, and massive teams. The syntax? Clean. The tooling? Solid. The vibe? “Don’t overthink it.”

And sometimes… that’s exactly what you need.

What I loved:

• Fast compile times and fast startup. Your builds won’t make coffee before running.
• Goroutines + channels = magical concurrency. Spawning thousands of concurrent tasks is natural and simple. This model just works for backend devs.
• The standard library is criminally good. HTTP servers, JSON parsing, testing no need to pull in 12 libraries to build a CLI or API.
• Tooling is automatic and opinionated:
• go fmt, go mod, go test no config drama, no rabbit holes

Go is optimized for writing code quickly, reading it later, and keeping teams sane. It forces you to write things in one way… and honestly, that’s freeing.

But I have gripes:

• Error handling is… tedious. You write if err != nil { return err } like 200 times a day. It’s not elegant it’s just repetition.
• Until recently, no generics. Now they’re here, but still feel bolted-on and underused.
• Not low-level enough for some tasks. You won’t be writing kernels or messing with memory layout like you would in Zig or Rust.

Go isn’t sexy, but it’s reliable. I’ve built CLIs, HTTP APIs, file processors, and DevOps tooling with it faster than any other language. If you’re doing infra, cloud stuff, or you just want to ship things fast without memory leaks Go delivers.

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So… what am I actually using?

After weeks of building, testing, reading docs, swearing at error messages, and rewriting tiny services… I landed on Go.

Yup. I know. Some of you just closed the tab.

But here’s the thing: Go works with my brain. It lets me ship fast, read my own code later, and not get bogged down in mental gymnastics. I love Rust’s elegance and safety, and Zig’s raw power makes my inner hacker smile but when I need to get something into production, Go is just calm.

It’s the least “cool” choice, but it’s the one that worked best for:

• Quick backend services
• CLI tools
• Microservices
• Anything I might need to debug at 3 a.m. in prod

That said, I still reach for Rust when I’m writing performance-critical stuff, messing with WASM, or need serious safety guarantees.

And I play with Zig on weekends when I want to feel like a basement wizard writing device drivers in my hoodie.

So which one should you pick?

It depends on what you’re building and how much you like pain:

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Other devs say…

I didn’t want to live in a language echo chamber, so I lurked the forums, dug into GitHub issues, and scrolled way too far on Reddit.

Here’s what fellow developers are saying about these three languages:

On Zig:

“Zig feels like C but designed by someone who actually likes developers.”
r/Zig

“Still too early for serious prod use, but it’s fun and clean and gives me total control.”
Hacker News thread on Zig 0.11

On Rust:

“Once Rust clicks, it’s like wearing a seatbelt that makes you faster.”
Rust user on GitHub

“The borrow checker is like that friend who always tells you you’re wrong — but is always right.”
Comment on r/rust

On Go:

“I hate how much I love Go. It’s boring. It’s safe. It’s productive.”
Hacker News thread on Go vs Rust

“The language is simple on purpose. If you want cleverness, write LISP.”
Go issue tracker discussion

The community sentiment is clear:

• Zig is promising, but niche
• Rust is powerful, respected, but intense.
• Go is boring and devs love it for exactly that reason.

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Resources if you’re choosing between them (with code vibes)

Here’s what each language feels like, in practice and where to dig deeper if you’re choosing one to learn next.

Zig

Code snippet: basic error handling and file read

zig

const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() !void {
    const stdout = std.io.getStdOut().writer();
    const file = try std.fs.cwd().openFile("data.txt", .{});
    defer file.close();
    var buffer: [1024]u8 = undefined;
    const read = try file.readAll(&buffer);
    try stdout.print("Read {} bytes\n", .{read});
}

Learn more:

• Zig documentation
• Zig Learn
• Zig by example

Rust

Code snippet: CLI argument parsing and error handling

use std::env;
use std::fs;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let file = env::args().nth(1).expect("Missing filename");
    let contents = fs::read_to_string(&file)?;
    println!("Read {} bytes", contents.len());
    Ok(())
}

Learn more:

• The Rust Book
• Awesome Rust
• ripgrep (Rust project)

Go

Code snippet: basic HTTP server

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
)
func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello, you've hit %s\n", r.URL.Path)
}
func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/", handler)
    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

Learn more:

• A Tour of Go
• Go by Example
• Cobra CLI framework

Each code sample shows you the soul of the language:

• Zig is raw and explicit no sugar, just power.
• Rust feels like types and safety had a baby with performance.
• Go just works. Fast, clean, and to the point.

Final thoughts: Choose your weapon

After playing with Zig, Rust, and Go for real projects not tutorials, not “Hello World” fluff I can honestly say: there’s no true winner.

Each one has a different vibe, a different pain-to-power ratio, and a different kind of joy (or chaos).

Here’s how I’d sum it up:

• Zig is for people who love writing everything themselves and hate surprises. It’s perfect if you want to build weird low-level stuff or explore system internals.
• Rust is for those who enjoy mental puzzles, need safety, and aren’t afraid of climbing the steepest curve for the biggest payoff.
• Go is for people who want to build things fast, work in teams, and stay productive without obsessing over memory layout or lifetime annotations.

I chose Go not because it’s the “most powerful,” but because it lets me focus on the thing I’m building, not the language itself. And honestly, that matters more when you’re deep in startup land or shipping tools to prod.

But…

If I were building a high-performance game engine? Rust.
If I were writing a bootloader or custom shell? Zig.
If I just need a server up by lunch? Go.

Try them all. See which one fits your brain. In the end, it’s not about hype; it’s about what helps you build without getting in your way.

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Comments

[O.F.K.]

Nice post, loved your reasoning and passion for experimenting, not just reading about stuff and flipping a coin.

Having said that, and for the sake of future readers contemplating this exact issue, since your mind is already made, let me a few more to the mix.
(I'll be brief about each such recommendation. If it caught your fancy, do the research. I assure you, you won't be wasting your time on any of them!)

Here we go:

1. V (AKA vlang): Go-like syntax (though parity is NOT a goal); FP-first, but there's plenty to like for OO folks too; memory managed, but can be made into manual memory mode; ecosystem budding and already existing; v0.5 with every new update packing a HUGE punch (move slow, but deliberate); extremely fast; excellent documentation on website, very little elsewhere; VERY performant: C-like speed, EXTREMELY fast compilation (on its self-hosted, bootstrapped compiler!); C-FFI exists, and is fairly easy to understand; compiles to both native code and JS.

2. Nim: Python-like syntax (though parity is NOT a goal); strongly OO-suited (with FP constructs built into the language, but mindset is OO); memory managed, but can be made manual; mature (v2 is out, ecosystem, while small due to small community, is there and growing); C-like speed, fast compile times (on the LLVM toolchain); compiles to both native and JS; Documentation is exceptional on their website, and there's actually a book on Manning, by the language designer; C-FFI exists and is very straight-forward.

3. Odin: the brainchild of one person, "Ginger Bill", very OO-ish (little FP constructs); memory managed but can be made manual; very much in its infancy, but already very promising; C-like speed with very fast compile to native code (don't think it compiles to anything else, yet); documentation is OK-ish on official website, not much elsewhere; C-FFI exists and is EXTREMELY easy to hook up.

Worth checking out if only because Bill is super responsive on the language's Discord server, and is a stand-up guy, and you see how, even being by himself, his language is so calculated and smart.
Kudos on him!

1. Janet!!! I'm going to say two, and only two, things about Janet: LISP-like syntax; THE MOST FUN I'VE HAD HOBBY-CODING IN A LONG WHILE.

Do what you want with that...

1. Crystal: Ruby-like syntax; memory managed; C-like speed... sadly it feels to me like this language/project is a stillborn, not having caught any traction and already slipping.

I'd advise you to look into it, but cautiously... the way things are with its message board, its GH issues, its general feel - here today, not so sure about tomorrow.

1. Haxe: For those that didn't hear about Haxe it's a surprise it's quite prominent in the gaming industry. After coding in it for 2 hours, I could see why.

Not my favorite, and I don't want to give even a brief intro because anything I'd write here would be a dis-service, but you SHOULD check Haxe out, if only so you know you don't want to use it.

Lastly, 7: OCaml.
Suffice it to say OCaml is the language, the basis, of Facebook's ReasonML which is simply a new, JS-like syntax, over OCaml's core compiler and toolchain!

C-like fast; compiles to native or JS (using said ReasonML); C-FFI; Functional; HM type-system (read about it! Really)... this language is packed to the brim with goodness.

If asked to rank my suggestions, I'd go: 1. OCaml, 2. Janet, 3. Haxe, 4. Nim, 5. Vlang, 6. Odin (sadly, but I'm rooting for it big times! But it's just not mature enough yet), and lastly, 7. Crystal.

Yes, 7 languages, and then there are the 3 you wrote about in your post, so that's already 10, and of course, the incumbent C/C++, and the many languages I never tried myself so I can't opine on (e.g., D, Pony)... the programming language landscape is growing by the minute (and we dare laugh at the JS ecosystem!)
No way to evaluate all the options and make a smart, informed, choice.
The selection paradox (AKA "menu paradox") at its peak.

But, you don't have to.
Maybe none of my suggestions sound compelling. Maybe one caught your attention and if you click with its syntax it's love at first Byte.

But at least now you're informed.
Yes, too much information is as bad as no information at all, but I'd rather know about my options, actively discarding some that simply don't vibe with me, than missing out on something that could be the best thing since sliced bread.

Enjoy your research everybody, and, if, like the OP of this blog post, you landed on Go... may have mercy on your soul. And codebase.