GZip in rust

This is my first Rust program and as such is not gong to be sophisticated. It is intended to do the same things as my gogzip program. My goal is to compare the pros and cons of Rust versus Go for this task. Rust seems like a pretty good fit for commandline utilities but I get the feeling that Go is a lot more confortable to use for things like web services and encryption with TLS certificates.

I'm finding error handling to be a bit of a learning experience. It looks to be quite capable but seems to be using a different underlying philosophy than I'm used to.

I will be adding in some tests. Adding in modules is beyond the scope of this project.

• rgzip -h - print usage
• rgzip <file> - gzip a file and remove the original
• rgzip -f <file> - gzip a file and overwrite if it is there already
• rgzip -k <file> - gzip a file and do not remove the original
• rgzip -c <file> - gunzip a file to stdout

I will be adding testing.

To build with debugging

cargo build

output goes in ./target/debug/rgzip

To build for release

cargo build --release

output goes in ./target/release/rgzip

Golang gogzip is slightly slower than the Rust rgzip release build. Both are slower than the built-in gzip.

The Go version has more lines, but it also has more going on. In general, though, the Rust version is a lot more concise. If the Rust version had the extra logic added to it that exists in the Go version it would still likely be half as many lines of code. This speaks I think partly to the languages themselves and also I am sure, my programming.

time for i in {1..1000}; do rgzip -k -f -i sample/*.txt; done

real	0m6.662s
user	0m3.735s
sys	0m1.848s

$: time for i in {1..1000}; do gogzip -f -k sample/*.txt; done

real	0m8.141s
user	0m4.123s
sys	0m3.811s

Here is the native one

$: time for i in {1..1000}; do gzip -f -k sample/*.txt; done

real	0m4.451s
user	0m1.428s
sys	0m2.852s