Go is not the only language with multiple return values. Lua for example had them before Go. In Lua it would look like: addsub = function(a, b) return a + b,

Go is not the only language with multiple return values. Lua for example had them before Go. In Lua it would look like: addsub = function(a, b) return a + b, a - b end a, b = addsub(32, 44) And if you run that code with LuaJIT it compiles down to a few machine code instructions, no object creation at all, no function call. In contrast I think at least in Python the tuple based solution would be horribly inefficient because it allocates/deallocates a new object every time just to pass values. I don't now if the Rust compiler is smart enough to optimize the tuple creation away.. but I doubt it.