> I don't think it's likely that a presentation about Zig is stealth marketing for Go
It’s obviously not coming from the presenter, but it is waay too common to see Rust and Go in the same sentence, when it is just dumb in most contexts.
I think you might have some nontraditional views here. Eg you say that Go isn't a low level and that Rust isn't a backend language - these are poorly defined terms and subjective judgment calls, so I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, but I will say that I and many others would regard Go as being low level, Rust as being a backend language (not to the exclusion of using it other places), and both languages as being peers you might weigh the benefits of on the same project.
Which is all to say, comparing Go to Rust makes a lot of sense to me.
They are poorly defined words, but they still have some sane usage.
How many production systems use Rust as their backends? Sure, it has 3 half-baked frameworks going on for it, but it is nothing like Spring, asp.net, python’s django, RoR, etc feature wise. It is as much a backend language as haskell is, hell, I’m quite sure there are much more haskell backends buzzing somewhere, than do rust ones, and even that is insignificant.
If Go is a low-level language, is OCaml, Haskell, C# and Java also that? They all are (or have ways to) AOT-compiled to a single binary that contains their runtime as well, there are zero differences to Go. Hell, all of them have arbitrary pointer manipulation as well, even if it doesn’t have specific syntax in every case, but it is a special library call. So there is an objective distinction in how Rust or Zig fundamentally operates compared to these.
"MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance network applications across a variety of cloud computing and mobile platforms."
"Docker Desktop avoids this problem by forwarding all traffic at user-level via vpnkit, a TCP/IP stack written in OCaml on top of the network protocol libraries of the MirageOS Unikernel project. The following diagram shows the flow of packets from the helper VM, through vpnkit and to the Internet:"
I'm not going to try and talk you out of your position, it's clearly an informed and considered one and I don't think you're wrong, but the answer to your question "why do people keep comparing these languages, and is it stealth marketing for Go?" is "no, it's not stealth marketing, other people just think about these things slightly differently and it makes more sense from that perspective."
Just to reiterate, I'm saying your views aren't the consensus, but I genuinely don't mean that as a criticism and do think you have a point.
"In addition to native support for standard operating environments, such as Linux distributions, the USB armory is directly supported by TamaGo, an WithSecure Foundry developed framework that provides execution of unencumbered Go applications on bare metal ARM® System-on-Chip (SoC) processors."
It’s obviously not coming from the presenter, but it is waay too common to see Rust and Go in the same sentence, when it is just dumb in most contexts.