Rust vs Go vs Zig for High-Performance Backend Services in 2026

Rust vs Go vs Zig: High-Performance Backend Services in 2026 Three languages compete for the performance-critical backend market. Each makes different trade-offs between safety, speed, and developer productivity. Performance Benchmarks Benchmark Rust Go Zig HTTP throughput (req/s) 892K 734K 812K JSON serialization 1.2M/s 890K/s 1.1M/s Memory per 10K conn 45MB 78MB 38MB Binary size 8.2MB 12.4MB 6.1MB Compile time (clean) 42s 3.2s 18s P99 latency (ms) 2.1 3.8 2.4 Benchmarks run on AWS c7g.2xlarge