The goals of Rust are stated boldly right on the official website - "Performance" is one of them. In Discord's case, the hit in productivity was worth avoiding the GC issues in Go. I read the article and didn't come to the same conclusion, so I'm curious which passages led you to believe this was done to "adopt a trendy language"?
Performance is not the core raison d'etre of Rust, and there are no shortage of testimonials to the difficulty new developers have with it, not to mention the slowness of its compiler. Given that, it's too much of a leap for me to get from "GC is too slow in Go" to "rewrite in Rust", at least when considered as a purely technical decision. There is no mention, for instance, of what other languages were considered. My guess is none were considered. Finally, the author states that Discord pride themselves in embracing new things, and cites having to work with the nightly build of the compiler to get async. All of this tells me that they chose Rust for non-technical reasons and were prepared to jump through all kinds of hoops to make it work. Which is fine, it's their business to run however they want, but I find the premise that Rust is an obvious choice for speed entirely unpersuasive. In most businesses, introducing unstable nightly builds of compilers to build production services would be a major red flag.
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