I've used Go in the past few years (but I never find the time / attention span to get any further than day 6), I really like it for this kind of thing because i

I've used Go in the past few years (but I never find the time / attention span to get any further than day 6), I really like it for this kind of thing because it's pragmatic, minimal environment setup / "sidequests", most things you need (reading/parsing files, etc) are builtin, performance is great and close to the metal (few hidden performance pitfalls), etc. I can't compare with Rust though because I've never used it. From a very superficial point of view though, it feels less pragmatic. But since AoC doesn't need memory safety or whatever criteria you have for production software, pragmatism and performance for later challenges are more important than safety.