What’s the Best Language for Building a High-Performance REST API?

At the end of the day, the best language is the one you can find talent for if you’re hiring, especially in a professional setting. For personal projects, pick something you enjoy working with, as you'll be spending a lot of time in it!

If you're looking for raw performance, Rust is incredible. It can handle up to 200,000 requests per second on a standard laptop without any major optimization. If you decide to go this route, you'll discover that Rust APIs can maintain predictable performance, which is a huge plus.

You can technically build a REST API with pretty much any programming language. The real performance bottlenecks usually come from what's going on behind the scenes, like database interactions or API calls. So, it's best to just go with a language you’re comfortable with or enjoy using.

High performance is definitely a relative term. In many cases, the choice between frameworks may not matter as much as the actual implementation behind your API. If you're planning to add AI features later, remember that the database and backend processes are often what slow things down the most. Focus on building a solid backend first, and optimize later if needed.

Honestly, there's no 'best' language for every scenario. It depends on what metrics you are focusing on, like throughput or response time. Go and Python with FastAPI are good choices because they're relatively easy to learn. Keep in mind that the overall performance often comes down to your architecture and how you set up your database.