June 27, 2026
Rust never sleeps, Go gets judged
WAL-RUS: a Rust Rewrite of WAL-G for PostgreSQL Backups
Backup tool gets a Rust makeover as fans cheer, nitpick, and defend the old one
TLDR: ClickHouse Cloud rebuilt a trusted database backup tool in Rust to make memory use more predictable in cramped systems. Commenters instantly split into two camps: one demanding real-world proof, the other insisting the older Go version was already doing just fine.
A very unglamorous corner of the internet just got surprisingly spicy. ClickHouse Cloud announced WAL-RUS, a new Rust-based rewrite of WAL-G, the software that quietly saves PostgreSQL databases from disaster by shipping backup files into storage. The company’s pitch is simple even for non-database people: the old tool worked, but its memory use could be hard to predict, and in tight environments that meant wasting precious room just to stay safe. So they rebuilt it in Rust to make resource use steadier and easier to plan.
But the real show was in the reactions. One camp immediately went full practical mode: nice rewrite, but where are the receipts? User caffeinated_me jumped in with the kind of battle-scarred question only someone who has suffered through backup pain would ask, wanting benchmarks for messy real-world workloads with long and short transactions mixed together. Translation: “Cool story, but does it survive chaos?”
Then came the counterpunch from nasretdinov, who basically said everyone should calm down because the Go version isn’t exactly a disaster. Yes, it uses more memory, but in their telling it’s not some outrageous catastrophe, and Go’s easier development experience still counts for a lot. That sparked the classic coding-language soap opera: Rust fans celebrating predictability, Go defenders saying the old tool was already pretty good, and everyone else grabbing popcorn. For backup software, this got delightfully dramatic fast.
Key Points
- •ClickHouse Cloud introduced WAL-RUS, an open-source Rust implementation of PostgreSQL backup and WAL archival tooling.
- •The article says WAL-RUS was built to address memory predictability issues encountered with WAL-G in resource-constrained environments.
- •It identifies Go runtime behavior, including fluctuating resident and virtual memory usage under garbage collection, as a capacity-planning challenge for long-running archival services.
- •WAL-RUS is described as using bounded worker pools, controlled concurrency, and reduced buffering to deliver a smaller and more predictable memory footprint.
- •The tool is intended to preserve WAL-G core functionality and compatibility, including use of the same WALG_ configuration variables.