2026-01-20
Rust vs Go for Claude
I had claude make me a ssh manager using Go and Wails. The reason was that I was reasonably confident that Go had a strong enough standard library to not need much dependencies and wails was great because it was web tech, the stuff that I'm most comfortable with.
I then tried to duplicate the project in Rust. I first had Claude make a full spec based on the existing project and then I had Claude break it into a set of steps that I could then feed into another claude instance. The goal was to do a 1-1 rewrite in rust where I could then add the RDP functionality. I thought it would be a worthwhile attempt and going in I was hopeful.
I also wanted some speed gains and figured Rust and Egui would be a good bet. I have never used egui so I did expect the look to not be great but I expected decent.
The overall attempt went poorly. I did about 60 prompts and got a working terminal and tabbing but it looks ugly and the biggest issue was compilation time became way too long.
I hadn't considered that running the build ands compiling would be huge but it became the bottleneck, moreso than the AI generation of code. Especially with claude, I like iterating and usually I never get the prompt right the first time. This meant that every feature results in me slowly refining things and with Rust it became untenable.
The other issue was that designing the layout with egui was difficult because of my own lack of experience. I couldn't use the right words and so everything looked poor. For example trying to get aligned tables was brutal until I realized that there was an egui tables library that I could use. I had asked Claude to not incorporate too many dependencies and so it must have thought tables were too far to add in.
It also doesn't help that using rust pulled in so many dependencies in general.
Overall, I think Go is still the best choice for Claude projects and I think Wails is great a GUI library.