Rust vs Go for CLI Tools in 2025: Performance, Ergonomics, and Ecosystem

Both Rust and Go have strong claims for CLI tool development. This article provides an unbiased comparison across ten criteria: startup time, binary size, memory footprint, compile speed, dependency management, cross-compilation, error handling ergonomics, async vs goroutine performance, library ecosystem depth, and learning curve. We build the same CLI tool in both languages — a recursive file search with regex filtering and parallel execution — and publish comprehensive benchmarks.