Is Rust web yet?

http://www.arewewebyet.org/

by weavie • 6 years ago

304 286 6 years ago

notRobot• 6 years ago

Rust can even run on the browser, by compiling to WebAssembly .

Forgive my ignorance (I haven't done front end web dev in almost a decade), but what is the use case for WebAssembly? What does it enable websites to do that (1) needs to be done within browsers and (2) can't be done with JS?

Also, are there any prominent websites that use WebAssembly? It's shipped with all browsers, but what percentage of users ever make use of it?

shrumm• 6 years ago

Figma does, and they cut their load time down by 3x. As a frequent user, I can attest to how snappy it feels despite the heavy computations it needs to do in the background. Evan Wallace, their CTO did a great write up on it [1].

[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

k__4• 6 years ago

I find it strange when people say "cut by 3 times"

What they did was cutting it to 30% or by 70%.

eloisius• 6 years ago

I’m also curious about how valuable writing rust that compiled to webasm is. Wouldn’t I still have to write a lot of un-rust-like code to manipulate the DOM? I could definitely see writing a core library in rust and wrapping it in a thin interface to use it in JS, though. Is that the idea?

johncolanduoni• 6 years ago

The stand-out uses of WebAssembly have mostly been augmenting a JavaScript application that has strenuous computation needs in certain parts. As others have mentioned Figma, Twitch, etc. have used it to great effect without rewriting their entire app in Rust or another linear-memory based language.

brohee• 6 years ago

https://tech.ebayinc.com/engineering/webassembly-at-ebay-a-r...

hknd• 6 years ago

https://webassembly.org/docs/use-cases/

TL;DR: - "almost fast as native code for web browsers” - in case you wanna do some expensive computing without a server - "Compiling Existing Applications for the Browser" - port existing code into the browser (eg cpp apps)

arethuza• 6 years ago

Using webasm as a general purpose platform for the execution of untrusted code is also pretty interesting - this might be within server side code or non-browser desktop apps.

m12k• 6 years ago

It's a way to do things in the browser that you normally can only do with JavaScript but with better performance and written in a different language

tester342• 6 years ago

You can use existing e.g C# libraries on the client side (browser)

e.g you can develop parser in console application and then ship it to the browser and use it there to parse e.g code without changing a single line of code or having to do some bullshit or traspiling it to js.

Once it matures it will allow you to get rid of writing javascript and use java, c#, rust, c++ and many other to write frontend.

secondcoming• 6 years ago

Basically, multithreaded adverts.

sbelskie• 6 years ago

The main thing it can do that can’t be done with JS is not having to use JS.

More seriously, one of the main draws is being able to us the same language on both the front and back end, which might be beneficial to reduce the need to duplicate model or just to be able to develop on the front end in ones preferred language.

kevingadd• 6 years ago

Among other things, wasm has access to float32, int64 and vector types that JS does not. It also has operations like reinterpret_cast that you can't do in JS without a store/load pair using a scratch buffer.

aikah• 6 years ago

JS does have BigInts though

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

ben-schaaf• 6 years ago

My use case is having written a compiler/interpreter in rust wasm lets you easily set up a playground for the language.

kthxb• 6 years ago

It's purpose is not to replace JS, but to extend it. For example for the performamce critical parts of applications. It is already used in big JS libraries (such as Hyphenopoly, Google's Draco or Long.js) and in lots of custom applications like the Twitch.tv media player and many 3D visualizations.

threeseed• 6 years ago

One example is source maps.

I have a web app where every time there is an error on the client side it sends it back to the server. On normal JS it locks up the browser for 10+ seconds. In WASM it's instant.

Never found another use except for this.

tester342• 6 years ago

On normal JS it locks up the browser for 10+ seconds

Weird, I think I do the same thing (global exception catcher) and it works fine

Closi• 6 years ago

what is the use case for WebAssembly?

I think the core use case is "Being something that's not Javascript".

The desktop programming world gets benefit from having multiple languages that suit different use-cases, so why would the web not?

pansa2• 6 years ago

what is the use case for WebAssembly?

Personally, it allows me to write tools that can run either on the command line or in the browser. Only the user-interface need be rewritten - internally both versions can share a lot of code.

WebAssembly makes it possible to do this using a language other than JavaScript. However, the languages I can use are still limited - AFAIK WebAssembly is currently only well-supported by C, C++ and Rust.

sradman• 6 years ago

what is the use case for WebAssembly?

There is no access to the DOM and the POSIX-like WASI interface is limited so the main use case is reusing code with manual memory management (C, Rust, etc).

WebAssembly also targets server-side JavaScript runtimes like Node, Deno, and Cloudflare Workers.

k__4• 6 years ago

I saw that performance became more uniform with Rust/WASM. Not faster all over, but less slow in the worst cases.

jlg23• 6 years ago

At the very minimum you can reuse the code for input validation on the server side in the client. Given that those, if maintained separately, tend to diverge, in my experience, this is a net win.

akudha• 6 years ago

Same questions, plus one more. Can anyone share a good resource that they have used to learn WebAssembly?

arrayjumper• 6 years ago

I used wasm for a computer vision related feature we built at work. It allowed us to reuse a bunch of things from opencv without having to reimplement those things in JS.

zelly• 6 years ago

Where's the Rust Django? Is this false advertising?

darthrupert• 6 years ago

Rocket still requires nightly. Rust folks should stop normalizing the use of nightly. Rust was "stabilized" almost 9 (edit 5,5 actually) years ago!

jeltz2• 6 years ago

Do you have any idea why that is? I am pretty sure procedural macros in an expression context landed in stable 1 or 2 releases ago.

mathstuf• 6 years ago

I believe they are waiting for releases of dependencies to not declare feature requirements. There's an issue linked in this subthread already for tracking it.

nicoburns5• 6 years ago

Rocket's development process is quite slow, and they haven't but out a release since then.

bschwindHN• 6 years ago

Wasn't Rust "stabilized" with its 1.0 release in 2015?

Ygg22• 6 years ago

Yes. But meta programming facilities aren't stabilized for obvious reasons (it ossifies the current implementation).

simias2• 6 years ago

I agree regarding the use of nightly Rust but fortunately it shouldn't be too long until a stable-compatible Rocket is released: https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket/issues/19

paavohtl3• 6 years ago

Technically speaking, stable Rocket requires nightly Rust, but nightly (master) Rocket runs on stable Rust. The compiler has finally stabilised all the necessary features for Rocket 1.0, it's just up to Rocket to finish their next release.

rethab• 6 years ago

As someone who has written quite a few lines in rust (rocket, specifically, while working on https://digester.app) I will agree that rust "is web", and yes, you can replace your Django.

But the development is experience and ecosystem is nowhere near (again, only speaking for rocket and I know a lot of work is being done to improve things) what you are used to from Django. For example, rocket's configuration system is quite limited (currently being reworked), poor cors support, limited test support, etc..

Again, not saying you can't do it, but it's not the same.

jamil72• 6 years ago

Yeah it's a little disingenuous I think, there is basically nothing that matches the productiveness of Rails/Django when it comes to building webapps and without a clear reason why or strong community around it I'm not sure what the point would be. If you're building a CRUD app I don't think language performance is going to be the bottleneck. I think Rust looks awesome but as someone who uses multiple programming languages daily I feel like we're too often looking for one language that can do everything rather than just picking up the one that fits the problem area.

dmos62• 6 years ago

there is basically nothing that matches the productiveness of Rails/Django when it comes to building webapps

That's a strong statement. Anyone care to back it up? I've never used Rails/Django.

iudqnolq• 6 years ago

How about Phoenix? It's not quite there yet, but I think it's much closer than Rocket.

ffdjjjffjj2• 6 years ago

You might be surprised by just how slow and bloated a simple rails or Django app can be!

But the real benefit for me is reliability. With rust web apps, I feel a lot more confident that runtime errors have been properly handled. And of course you save some productivity because the type system means you don’t need to smother your code in unit tests like one normally does when they want to demonstrate their python or ruby code works.

txdv• 6 years ago

I love the fact that they have their own native implementations of clients for mysql, postgres and mongo.

In the Java world people just use jdbc and wrap it with a threadpool and expose it as "async", but in rust it is truly async down to the system call.

_cobe_bero__3• 6 years ago

There are several async drivers for Java, the most prominent probably https://vertx.io/docs/#data_access.

Go, Python, C# have native implementations as well, e.g. the de facto standard Postgres driver for Go (which is by the way super fast), https://github.com/JackC/pgx

jbverschoor• 6 years ago

Orm, controllers, templates and routing is not nearly as complete as the rails stack and ecosystem. Same goes for Phoenix

Droobfest• 6 years ago

Do you mean that Rust is not as complete as Phoenix, or that Phoenix is not as complete as Rails?

galfarragem2• 6 years ago

Is Rust marketable yet? Stackoverflow jobs (2020-10-30) that require:

    Rust - 15/2462
    C - 71/2462
    Go - 105/2462
    Kotlin - 109/2462
    Typescript - 147/2462
    C++ - 193/2462
    C# - 221/2462
    Java - 544/2462

_lbaq• 6 years ago

The only rust jobs I’ve seen so far are “crypto/blockchain”, but I’m just casually follow the development, anyone knows other niches adopting Rust?

iExploder• 6 years ago

embedded / iot / automotive, this currently stands on c ecosystem due to suppliers and billions of lines of legacy code

the failure of rust was it tried to start from scratch where better solution would be to seamlessly integrate into c,

maybe if gcc has support for compiling rust the future switchover on embedded would be easier

_cobe_bero__3• 6 years ago

I've done some researching for Rust jobs in several European countries. It's basically everywhere well below 1% of all dev job offers.

simias2• 6 years ago

It'll probably take a few more years still. I've started introducing rust into my "stack" at work for some new projects and I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation, so when I decide to move to a different job there'll probably be one more Rust opening for somebody to take over.

The ecosystem needs to settle and stabilize a bit more before it reaches deep adoption in the industry as a whole. If you're a lean "disruptive" start up then you probably don't mind using more experimental technologies but big, established companies like to have a more long term vision. You don't want to have to rewrite half of your software 5 years from now because nobody uses FancyLang anymore.

ragnese3• 6 years ago

Chicken and egg. Python wasn't marketable before 2005-ish, either. I hope you didn't bother learning that silly niche language.

cambalache2• 6 years ago

Python was a top-10 language easily in 2005-ish. Nowadays Rust is only as half as popular as Go, a language that isnt even in the top 10. Rust will go the way of Scala, Haskell or Erlang, interesting but niche.

hugodutka4• 6 years ago

I have been dabbling in Rust web development lately, coming from a Django/Flask background. I take issue with the article stating:

Can I replace my Rails/Django/Flask already? Yup!

While I agree that you can try to replace Flask with Rust web frameworks, you can't do it for Rails or Django. Rust web frameworks do not let you easily test your application's database access layer nor provide advanced authorization, and lack other features that become necessary when your application becomes bigger.

If you don't need the performance that Rust provides, you should still go for Django or Rails. Otherwise you will end up reinventing them.

joelbluminator3• 6 years ago

You can replace Rails with anything that's Turing complete right? We all know that. C, Assembly, Rust, anything can work. I just don't see WHY. If you're gonna say performance I'm gonna say who cares.

hugodutka4• 6 years ago

John Carmack once did [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21907517

pdpi• 6 years ago

Performance doesn't matter until it does. I've seen a malloc upgrade save millions of dollars.

Yoric9• 6 years ago

The reason for which I want to build my web stuff on Rust is safety. There are so many things that can go wrong on a server (especially on a server under attack) that I want to at least trust my language and framework.

Sadly, I have reached a stage at which there are very few languages I trust anymore to actually not explode in unpredictable manners when push comes to shove. Rust is one of them.

gameswithgo• 6 years ago

at work we care about web performance a lot, because we have a huge amount of traffic. so you could say anyone whobmanages a great deal of success may care about performance. yes you can scale wide but complexity and costs grow as you do. as well, there are plenty of non python/ruby web backends that offer way more performance without the productivity downsides of rust and c++

legulere5• 6 years ago

Site speed has a pretty big impact on e.g. conversion rates.

jen20• 6 years ago

If you're gonna say performance I'm gonna say who cares.

Whoever pays the electricity bill?

squeral• 6 years ago

I agree. It will take some time until we have a Rust framework that is as robust and feature-rich as Django or Rails.

musicmatze• 6 years ago

Rails was released 16 years ago (according to wikipedia). Rocket just got the first release that builds on stable rust. Thus: Give it 15 years, we'll be there!

akmittal• 6 years ago

Even if performance matter Go should be a better choice. Go's performance is very close to rust in Web ecosystem and is very mature.

legulere5• 6 years ago

Or C# with ASP.NET Core which is much closer to rust in performance.

felipellrocha• 6 years ago

That’s just not true. More mature, sure. But the language experience couldn’t be more different between the two, and that counts. I don’t wanna be wasting my time with quirkiness.

bluejekyll2• 6 years ago

Rust web frameworks do not let you easily test your application's database access layer nor provide advanced authorization

Can you expand on this comment a bit? I find testing in Rust to be fantastic. Rocket makes for calling test functions simply via standard rust in tests, though you’ll need to build some test harness boot strap for your DB, but you generally end up doing that in any language for functional/end-to-end tests.

WJW• 6 years ago

you’ll need to build some test harness boot strap for your DB

You kinda answered your own question here. Rails and Django have built in support for end-to-end and functional tests, including database access in the same way as the normal app, all autogenerated. That is just table stakes for web frameworks these days.

thomaslord• 6 years ago

I think this probably covers it: > you’ll need to build some test harness boot strap for your DB

From what I've seen, it's totally possible to use Rust for web development. However, there are tons of web frameworks in various languages that provide way more out of the box than you can find in Rust. These frameworks have had tons of time to mature - Ruby on Rails is 16 years old, Django is 15 years old, Laravel is 9 years old, and so on.

I think (and hope) Rust will get there eventually, but I think it'll take some time. There's a lot of hype, but speaking as a web developer who's interested in Rust I think there will need to be a lot more tooling and a lot of educational content before it gains any significant market share. I got my start with C/C++ before I ever touched web stuff, but I never got too far into advanced language features. That combined with not having written a serious C program in years makes Rust something I'd really have to commit to learning, so even though I'd love to have a faster better-typed alternative to PHP I won't be writing any actual webapps in Rust in the near term.

Basically, I think most of the people writing webapps in Rust will be Rust people interested in the web rather than web people interested in Rust for a while. There are of course organizations that do more complex stuff on the web and will jump on this sooner, especially places that use microservices and don't have to move their whole platform over, but many people building simpler sites with smaller teams will wait until there's a substantially larger ecosystem.

hugodutka4• 6 years ago

thomaslord and WJW did a great job saying what I would have said. Django already provides you the harness, and when you try to implement it yourself you will run into some gnarly technical problems. How do you make sure one test's database changes are not seen by a different test? Are you going to run tests sequentially and reset the DB before every single one? Or are you going to try to wrap your requests in a transaction that can be rolled back afterwards? Any approach you take, you are reinventing what Django already does.

ibraheemdev2• 6 years ago

I am the author of the updated home page. Although the main content was provided by a previous maintainer of the website.

No one is saying that Rust dev will be as smooth as Django. In fact, there is another paragraph right below:

While development might not be as smooth as something like Rails or Django, the Rust web development ecosystem and community is engaged and very helpful. A lot of work has been put into the web in the past few years, and we're getting there!

You can replace a Django app with Rust. While you might have to put in extra work to:

test your application's database access layer
provide advanced authorization

The main point that the author wanted to make is that Rust is suitable for scale web development. It might not be perfect, but we are getting there, and the ecosystem and community is very large, engaged, and helpful.

nicoburns5• 6 years ago

I would consider removing the reference to Django. Rust frameworks are great and make an excellent alternative to flask/sinatra/express, but they are nowhere close to as full-featured as Django/Rails/Laravel. Those frameworks are a whole other class of thing which I hope the Rust ecosystem will eventually aspire to, but it's not there yet.

gremlinsinc4• 6 years ago

I wish there were a Laravel for Rust. I've tried rocket/actix but laravel's ease to launch an app from cli, and organize code structure, configs, etc... makes life much easier. Go kind of has a few (Buffalo and Beego), waiting for a true MVC framework for rust.

devsquid2• 6 years ago

I love Rust and I love the direction its pushing. But these kinds of websites are awful. If you can't get the nuances why Rails/Django/Many other frameworks are a better solution for writing a web server than I dunno what to tell you.

ibraheemdev2• 6 years ago

But these kinds of websites are awful

Care to share why? It provides a lot of useful information and curated packages for common categories. It is actually widely used as a reference for package selection. Just because you disagree does not make it "awful"

xiaodai• 6 years ago

Wouldn't rust fail for the same reason there is no c++ framework that cna take on django? Rust is a pretty complex framework.

daniel_iversen• 6 years ago

But is it web scale? ;)

cyberfart• 6 years ago

It has joins, so no ;)

waynesonfire• 6 years ago

Title needs to be updated.

_cobe_bero__3• 6 years ago

Rust has been "web ready" for some time. C++ is "web ready", too.

But why should one choose Rust when there're plenty of alternatives with much larger and much more stable ecosystems. And those alternatives offer much higher productivity and a much larger talent pool.

Rust is not even the fastest web framework (https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/) . And the benefit over Java, C# or Go is really negligible. Who needs more than 300000 req/s and can't afford servers to scale?

So, another nice try from the Rust evangelists, but no thanks.

infinityplus1• 6 years ago

Many people use Node.js and Javascript because they get to use one language on both server and web browser. Rust can probably do the same in future. Rust on server, Rust with WASM on web browsers and then Rust for local software.

tupputuppu2• 6 years ago

Right, so you're saying we can take rust web backend seriously once Rust is popular in front ends? Cool, I agree, but that's just never going to happen.

zcw100• 6 years ago

Why should we do anything new? I've been seeing this attitude more and more where developers think they're entitled to be convinced to use some new technology as though their time and attention are so valuable it's someone else's responsibility to convince them to spend it.

What I think differentiates this from normal outreach and education that every project needs to do to build a community is the sense of entitlement and the declaration that they're outright hostile and argumentative and then expect to be engaged.

amelius• 6 years ago

Why should we do anything new?

I think a problem exists when that something new is being pushed and hyped in order to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where everybody starts jumping on the bandwagon and an ecosystem is built.

hackerfromthefu4• 6 years ago

Seems like a natural defensive mechanism against the hype train, which is real and various industries make their living from churn. Because of the bias of vested interests many new things that are pushed are not really in the developers interest. Some are, and some are worth the effort, but many aren't and how do you know which without expending your limited resource of attention?

moksly• 6 years ago

Why should we do anything new?

From a management positions this is probably the most important question you can ask. Your most expensive resource is your programmers, and a few talented operations guys, and you need a good reason to expend those resources.

We work rather closely with other municipalities, and one in particular is very adoptive of new things. One of the things they adopted was kubernetes. But the thing is, we’re not Netflix, and kubernetes isn’t easy, and the result was they spend two years worth of man hours on something that didn’t make them anymore competitive than us because the advantages never really comes into play in our small enterprise organisations.

We spent those two years worth of manhours improving our Azure strategy, getting our operations guys up to speed on powershell and our developers on python, and actually moved our organisation forward in a manner that was useful.

Maybe Rust is useful, maybe it’s going to have a brighter web-future than .Net Core, but if you can’t show me how that is, or why I should adopt it, then it’s a really big risk that I’m happy to let other people take. We can always adopt it later.

Of course you probably meant to ask the question in a different light, and I think that point is very valid. I just can’t stress enough, how little something being all the hype actually means. What if Rust turns out to be another Ruby on Rails or “Node.JS for everything” craze? Then I won’t lose any sleep over never having thouched it, and if you look at our local job market, then there hasn’t been a single Rust focused job in my entire country for two years now. Not even as a “nice if also you know” listing. That doesn’t exactly install me with confidence that Rust is ever going to be important.

fluffything3• 6 years ago

But why should one choose Rust when there're plenty of alternatives with much larger and much more stable ecosystems.

In my experience, and this is just a data point: because it is much simpler to write correct Rust code and to refactor large Rust code bases correctly than doing the same for Javascript, Ruby, Python, C++, C, Java, etc.

That Rust has great perf and uses little resources is just a bonus, but not something that most apps will care much about.

The downsides you mention about the ecosystem, libraries, frameworks, are real.

I disagree with your claim that there is no "talent pool" for Rust. The "talent pool" for javascript or C++ is _only_ "all javascript experts" or "all C++ experts" because if you are not very good at Javascript or C++, you can't really be trusted. A Javascript programmer can start being productive in Rust without issues quickly, but the same wouldn't be true if they had to program in C++ instead.

The "talent pool" for Rust is "all programmers with domain knowledge". If they are not experts in Rust, that doesn't matter. Smart people you want to hire all pick up Rust very quickly, and the amount of dangerous mistakes anyone can make by not being a Rust expert is very small.

Offer/demand wise, the demand for Rust jobs is much higher than the Rust jobs that are currently available. If you post a Rust job on reddit you'll get 100 CVs in a day...

---

IMO, your main point still holds: right now Rust web frameworks are not as feature full as Django, Rails, etc. and if Rust frameworks are missing features you need, picking it up for a professional project probably doesn't make sense. Unless... you are willing to implement those features yourself...

rkangel2• 6 years ago

C++ is "web ready", too

C++ is not a good fit for network accessible services. It is too easy (even with Modern C++) to cause memory based security problems (and I say this as someone who writes protocol stacks in C and C++ for a living).

Rust's security story is much better out of the box.

sk20203• 6 years ago

Actix-web makes some very aggressive use of unsafe. Many core Rust libraries do too. If you trust those authors (some very fresh out of school) to have zero mistakes, why would you not trust the C++ STL?

FpUser• 6 years ago

Not sure of your protocol stacks but I happen to write network accessible services in modern C++ for living as well. Without going into much details I'd say that I do not really share your point of view. Not sure when was the last time I had any memory related problem with modern C++.

ragnese3• 6 years ago

I appreciated your comment until the snarky last sentence.

typon• 6 years ago

Who needs more than 300000 req/s and can't afford servers to scale?

Exactly companies who can afford to scale. If you could switch from Python to Rust and reduce your server costs by 10x, why wouldn't you?

mkl95• 6 years ago

Can you trivially write a CRUD service with Swagger docs and JWT authentication using Rust? And how does performance compare to a FastAPI app?

steveklabnik8• 6 years ago

My company is writing services that use OpenAPI (aka Swagger) heavily. I don't believe we are doing JWT currently. https://github.com/oxidecomputer/dropshot

I've never used FastAPI, but https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r19 (which is the first thing TechEmpower shows me) says that for this specific test (and maybe others are different, you should look into it!), FastAPI does 52,080 RPS, and actix-core does 651,144.

Dowwie7• 6 years ago

One person's trivial 1-day of effort is another person's month. There's a solid jsonwebtoken library that could be used in a custom token authentication middleware, if the one in the ecosystem is unsatisfactory. It's not trivial to learn a web framework and how to write custom middleware, but if you know where to look for actix-web there is an example: https://github.com/actix/actix-extras/blob/master/actix-web-...

qaq• 6 years ago

When Rocket lands Async/Await and other major reworks in flight maybe. Actix-Web is fast but ergonomics of writing Actix web apps are def. substandard compared to other mature ecosystems.

_huayra_5• 6 years ago

Is there a web framework / ecosystem built on a statically-typed, non-JVM language that comes close to the feature set of either Django/Rails?

After spending too much time chasing down dynamic-typing related bugs in both of those frameworks, I find myself missing a lot of their feature set when I look at other frameworks. However, I'm tired of doing "defensive programming" in Python to essentially statically assert argument types and unit test things that a statically-typed language would disallow by construction.

This stuff in Rust, Go, and even Nim [0] look interesting, but the consensus seems to be the value proposition of Rails or Django is still hard to beat unfortunately.

[0] https://nim-lang.org/

izzle49• 6 years ago

just curious why non jvm?

_huayra_5• 6 years ago

I haven't used the JVM in a long time, but judging by the web framework benchmarks I've checked out this morning e.g. [0], it seems like there are many Go frameworks that beat those on the JVM.

I agree with other commenters on this thread that in general such benchmarks may not mean a lot when compute is so cheap and the autoscaling infrastructure is awesome, but I often work on embedded platforms or other resource constrained devices where adding the JVM is a nonstarter (not that Django or Rails is an option either in those cases).

[0] https://github.com/the-benchmarker/web-frameworks

TrueDuality2• 6 years ago

The biggest one first: Operationally maintaining the JVM is a nightmare. It can be fast, but that isn't guaranteed and its not trivial to find out why, and easy for developers to mess up. It uses significantly more memory than anything else which will be your largest cost driver when running large services, compute is cheap, RAM is not.

Security is probably the next biggest one. Vulnerabilities in the JVM are a problem but you'll have that in most software (given maybe only Flash beats the JVM in the history of boths existence) but the defaults for running a lot of things like groovy aren't secure (there is a debug port you can directly manipulate the memory of the running process without authentication). Commonly people use these debug ports in production, not just leave the defaults but actively choose to let them run. This is a very common pattern in Java based services usually caused by my first point. I am not aware of any other language or framework that offers remote memory access as a feature.

Then there are the dependencies and package ecosystem. I believe the "built on the JVM" languages like Kotlin have gotten a lot better at this, but as soon as you start tapping into the pure Java "enterprise grade" libraries you're most likely bringing in way more than you bargained for both in terms of complexity, maintainability, and security. A lot of those libraries are simply poorly built.

crenwick• 6 years ago

C# or maybe Node with typescript.

_huayra_5• 6 years ago

Is C# usable from Mono? I've kinda shyed away from C# due to not running Windows myself (and running it on the platforms at work is impossible), but I haven't had the time to try it with Mono.

lincolnq• 6 years ago

We use Mypy to type check python, and I really like that system. Catches a lot of errors. Not as many as a full static typing system, but still a lot, and you can always drop back into dynamic typing when you want.

_huayra_5• 6 years ago

Wow thanks! Does it just insert these checks automatically (`assert type(my_param) == int`)? I remember being so disappointed when I saw PEP484 and realizing that it didn't enforce anything.

fuy• 6 years ago

asp.net core comes to mind

asplake2• 6 years ago

Can I add "ML-typed" to your spec? That's what would finally make me jump from Python/Flask

_huayra_5• 6 years ago

What did you jump to? I've been trying to bootstrap my Haskell knowledge as a covid sanity maintenance project, but Yesod doesn't seem to have the same level of dedication by maintainers as django.

htns• 6 years ago

There's Crystal: https://crystal-lang.org/

flohofwoe4• 6 years ago

I'm a big fan of WASM to run my cross-platform code in browsers, but everytime I see it pitched as wholesale replacement for Javascript frameworks which sit on top of the DOM I flinch a bit.

This is essentially the reverse of "with Electron you can now create native applications entirely in Javascript". Yes it works, but only with a lot of overhead that wouldn't exist by doing it the "straightforward" way.

A much smarter approach is to create hybrid JS/WASM applications, manage the UI in Javascript, move isolated standalone features (cross-platform code or performance-sensitive code) into WASM modules, and call into those WASM modules from JS.

jabl• 6 years ago

Will we see the next generation of electron applications using WASM for the bulk, and JS for the UI?

flohofwoe4• 6 years ago

Heh, good point. In my last sentence I was thinking about web apps running in browsers, not about Electron (but of course there's a lot of overlap).

For native applications, maybe a better idea is to drive the UI with native code, and use WASM to run "untrusted" external code (for instance extensions/plugins), because a WASM runtime is a lot smaller than a complete browser engine like Electron.

untog• 6 years ago

I’d be surprised, given that one of the big arguments for using Electron is that you get to write it in JS.

If you write Rust for WASM you could just use a native UI framework and target that instead!

hackerfromthefu4• 6 years ago

A lot of people want to avoid the Javascript ecosystem because of fragmentation, churn and a range of other reasons. e.g. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

I suppose they consider working with other languages, ecosystems and communities a smarter approach. Perhaps they have good reasons.

flohofwoe4• 6 years ago

Yeah I see the point, but you need to consider the downsides too.

It's hard to get the binary size of WASM modules down to the size of minified Javascript, especially for code that calls into the browser anyway (e.g. for manipulating the DOM). Depending on what the code does it's not impossible, and sometimes WASM even comes out smaller, but this takes a lot of optimization and tweaking, and often developers are blind to this sort of problem (it mostly affects the users after all).

One cannot simply hand-wave those points away just because Javascript sucks (even ignoring the fact that JS hate is often completely irrational, I don't like the language either, but sheesh, C++ or Rust are not that much better).

chickahoona• 6 years ago

So in summary I'd say that HN highly disagrees with the author...

ablekh2• 6 years ago

Speaking of Rust's WebAssembly runtime option, I would argue that, unless one is heavily biased toward using Rust, ASP.NET's Blazor WebAssembly host option has a more attractive value proposition overall, due to a much more comprehensive developer and tooling ecosystems.

I'm quite impressed by Microsoft's Blazor and .NET Core teams working on improving Blazor's performance and decreasing the system bundle's download size. Blazor's performance in upcoming .NET 5 is reported to be already 2-3x better than in .NET 3. I expect that ongoing work on ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation to WebAssembly, including an ability to freely mix AOT- and JIT-compiled code (expected to be shipped as part of .NET 6) will further improve Blazor's competitive position vs. Rust's WebAssembly from the performance perspective.

legulere5• 6 years ago

The problem with blazor is that the only thing that is in webassembly is the bytecode interpreter and not your code. More is currently problematic because too much C# code relies on reflection making AOT difficult and webassembly not having garbage collection integration yet.

hackerfromthefu4• 6 years ago

That is not correct, or not the full story.

Blazor has two separate modes, 'Server Side' and 'Web Assembly'.

What you're describing is the server side mode.

The second mode, called Web Assembly, compiles your code to WASM that is executed in the browser.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/hosting-...

Also, "The .NET 5.0 core framework libraries have been annotated to indicate what works in the WebAssembly runtime, so developers now get a warning in the code editor when attempting to call an unsupported method." from https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/15/microsoft_emits_net_5...

ablekh2• 6 years ago

Thank you for mentioning this. Your first sentence is true, but only for the current JIT-compiled option. Even in this case, Blazor is still functionally (i.e., excluding performance aspect) comparable with Rust WebAssembly option (and any other WASM-targeted language options, for that matter). Assuming that relevant AOT challenges would be solved as planned, it would make Blazor an option fully (i.e., including performance-wise) comparable with Rust WebAssembly.

lipanski• 6 years ago

I spent some of my time building or trying to build various web apps in both Rust and Crystal. The Rust web experience of several years ago was very frustrating and it was partially due to the lacking ecosystem but also due to the nature of the language. The safety guarantees that the language provides are great if you care about that, but they can be quite a pain when you just want to get something out. The majority of web projects fall in the last category. The language ergonomics have improved since (you don't have to do so much pointer juggling any more) but it's still no way near other languages that might only cover these guarantees partially or not at all. Language ergonomics is a very important aspect because it can limit both the development speed of your project but also the speed at which the ecosystem develops.

The performance aspect (aside from WebAssembly, where it has few contenders) is something that can be partially matched by other technologies.

By comparsion, developing for the web in Crystal is quite enjoyable. The language has great ergonomics (I'd say even better than Ruby). The web ecosystem might not be mature but it's blooming and it has you covered in the main areas. Most importantly, if you're missing something, it's very easy to build it yourself. The standard library contains a lot of web goodies, including a very decent HTTP client, a server, easy to use and fast JSON and XML parsers, an OAuth2 client (yes!). The language feels like it was built for the web, which I can't say about Rust.

In the end, what matters is your use case and the trade-offs you are willing to make (development speed vs. performance vs. safety guarantees). If I would have to build a load balancer, I might consider Rust. For a normal web app, I'd personally go with something like Crystal, Ruby, Python, Node.

jkoudys2• 6 years ago

My company Clausehound has completely moved its legal tech contract analysis and version control platform onto rust, and launched a couple months ago. It's been fantastic. We're a similar setup to a lot of the top links on there (actix-web over juniper for graphql resolving with sqlx). While the speed is incredible, the biggest improvement has been the types system. I've never had such an easy experience being able to pick and choose libraries based on shared traits - eg we could authorize on jwt using jsonwebtoken, load fairly complex migrated relational data into our nice models, and even wrote the crate phpass so we could keep some accounts created back when we were a WordPress blog working.

The strict typing in graphql has made dataloaders orders of magnitude faster. The same code that makes our business logic clear makes it easy to figure out if graphql needs to resolve all those nodes with individual sql queries, one against the parent node, build some `IN (?,?,?,?)` prepared statement, or resolve from cache. String manipulation is definitely a bit harder, but otherwise the experience as a web app developer has been amazing.

andrewnc• 6 years ago

Would you agree that the resources in the linked article are a good starting point to learn about your specific rust stack, or do you have additional resources you would recommend?

jkoudys2• 6 years ago

Yeah, I probably have been a lazy member of the greater dev community because I learned a lot of these things but never blogged about it myself. Juniper for graphql is a big missing piece from that page -- gql is big enough as an alternative to REST that it ought to be at least considered, while RESTful services typically come baked-in because they rely so much on standard HTTP (so their use with eg actix-web is obvious). What I really found amazing was how we could write one struct, e.g. an Organization, and easily build them from JWT claims, SQL queries, graphql payloads, or POST params. With many other framework libraries, I'd really agonize over graphql vs rest, but because the types are so rigidly defined, it's very easy to write the definitions once and use them everywhere, so RESTful endpoints are simple to setup where there's a client demand for them.

An extremely cool new one is serde_pickle support (python's favourite binary serialization), which we're using to load tiny word-vectorization dictionaries in WASM. This lets lawyers collaborate concurrently on the same contract, and farms out the laptops/phones they're working on's GPU cycles to auto-draft the contract (e.g. type 8 words, and can see "85% chance this a non-disparagement clause -- here's some example language you can use. Here's some case law saying when it's enforceable and when it's not").

a012• 6 years ago

I'm new to Rust and trying to do some tasks with Rust's rusoto library, but it seems like too verbose and lacking documents as well as examples of how one can do things with it. Comparing to boto3 library, it's a steep learning curve to me.

speedgoose3• 6 years ago

I am playing with Rust on a side project. I use graphql with juniper on the server side, and WebAssembly on the client side, together with Vue. I love it. It's still more complex and verbose than a full javascript project, and the compilation time are long but I enjoy it.

I would recommend Rust over Typescript, if you are going to spend time on types, use Rust it's more worth it.

k__4• 6 years ago

Any resources on how to get started?

I tought about using Rust instead of JavaScript for frontend for some time.

On the one hand, Rust is a step back, because there is quite some things you have to do more than with JavaScript.

On the other hand, Rust has an interesting type system that could save you in the long run and things like pattern-matching and expressions everywhere is even a direct usability improvement over JavaScript.

So it's not, Rust is more low-level than JavaScript, that's why it's bad for frontend, but more, Rust is different from JavaScript some parts are harder, some are easier.

speedgoose3• 6 years ago

I went with the official documentation of rust and rust-wasm. It was okay.

I would recommend to use the best tool for your problem. If you want to display a button and manage click events, don't use Rust it's not worth it.

tupputuppu2• 6 years ago

Worth it in which way? Due to the types?

So the vast ecosystem and ready functionality offered by typescript or other high level languages is worth less than what exactly?

speedgoose3• 6 years ago

Dealing with types is boring so if I'm going to spend time on this, it should have enough benefits. In my humble opinion the rust typing system is more interesting than what typescript can offer.

The main advantage for me is the monad. Sure you could use monads in typescript or even vanilla javascript but in Rust, everything uses monads.

The vast javascript ecosystem is available to rust in the browser too. Server side it's not as big and I agree javascript has a point there. But now, if you look at the ecosystem of libraries with proper and up-to-date typescript definitions, well it's not that great.

kissgyorgy• 6 years ago

Saying that it can replace Django is quite an overstatement! The only framework which can be compared in features is Rails and Spring, nothing else even comes close! Not to mention the productivity benefits... Rust is a good language, but with these compile times for a complex Django-like web application? No thanks.

wil421• 6 years ago

Not to mention Django (and flask) come with a ton of modules to get you up and running.

Not sure I personally feel comfortable building my own authentication modules. The rocket example was similar to one I did in flask but with flask I didn’t feel like I was creating my own auth. Rocket guards and JWT left me feeling like it was much easier to make a huge mistake.

Benjmhart• 6 years ago

Yeah, but those compile times catch bugs everyone misses in your Django app.

People think speed is the only advantage, reducing runtime debugging and providing a more secure, more correct front end, free null pointer issues and free of memory leaks and runtime type errors - rust just has the added bonus of being fast.

You're right some of the tools aren't quite there and if you move a rails-y app over to rust, you have a job ahead of you to assemble some libraries, but it is doable - the point is that you can put rust in production at web scale now.

Dowwie7• 6 years ago

It is absolutely an overstatement and people should be more careful with misrepresenting what the Rust language and ecosystem offers. Rust has its strengths just as Python does. None of the authors of the web frameworks are aspiring to build a Django or Flask like experience.

gremlinsinc4• 6 years ago

What about laravel?

Rails doesn't even have it's own authentication built in?

Seems laravel, might be closer to django, and with jetstream - it has an admin area baked in, which others don't.

Laravel is also just as, if not more performant (if you mix in swoole).

thrownaway954• 6 years ago

love how it claims that "it's freaking fast", yet has no performance metrics on the page. granted they might be hidden behind a link a or two, but i'm going hunting for something when you should have it right there on the page to back up your claims.

The_rationalist• 6 years ago

Let's remember that while actix web rank very high in techempower up, most of it's performance lead come because of it's async connection with postgres. Other languages will catch up in this regards in a few years (e.g loom for Spring)

40four3• 6 years ago

I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering, but why would someone want to write web code in Rust.

To be fair, as a web developer by day, I still haven’t gotten around to trying to write any Rust in my free time. I am curious though. But after browsing the docs of actix-web and rocket, it seems a bit of a reach to say you could use these solutions in place of monolithic frameworks Django or Rails.

Maybe if they had said they could take the place of an Express/ Slim / Flask app I wouldn’t have rolled my eyes as hard. Wouldn’t these battle tested ‘micro’ frameworks be a better comparison?

Anyway, since I really know next to nothing about Rust, what would be the benefits for me to pick say, Actix-web over Slim to start a new project?

I get the feeling the best reason would be I’m already an experienced Rust developer and want to leverage that domain knowledge. Or maybe a team that already writes a lot of Rust wants to keep consistency over their repos.

couchand7• 6 years ago

The best part about Rust is the type system. For one example, in a web app I'm building for a client, we have two types to represent invoice ids: one for the invoice id that came back in a response from the API, and one for an invoice id that a user is asking for. They are distinct because we know that an InvoiceId refers to an actual invoice in the system, and a UnverifiedInvoiceId might not. Both of them are distinct from a CustomerId or any other id.

This might sound like it could get cumbersome fast, but it's actually really simple in practice, due to clever uses of traits. UnverifiedInvoiceId implements rocket::FromParam, so I can deserialize it from a URL parameter. InvoiceId is only created in the serde::Deserialize implementation of an invoice-returning API response.

So a (significantly simplified) endpoint in the app might look like:

    #[get("/invoices/<unverified_invoice_id>")]
    pub fn get_invoice_by_id(
        unverified_invoice_id: UnverifiedInvoiceId,
        api_conn: ApiConnection,
    ) -> HtmlResponse {
        // API "search" methods take unverified user input as parameters
        let invoice = api_conn.fetch_invoice_by_id(unverified_invoice_id);

        // API "lookup" methods take verified ids
        let line_items = api_conn.fetch_invoice_line_items(invoice.id);

        render_invoice(invoice, line_items);
    }

I can't accidentally switch up things that don't belong together, even though under the hood they're all just unsigned ints.

nivethan2• 6 years ago

Business logic is where Rust would shine and rust feels nicer to work in than java.

oftenwrong• 6 years ago

One time I made an authentication system for an application that had some types like PlainTextAccountPassword and HashedAccountPassword. The storage backend for accounts accepted a HashedAccountPassword only. This way it would be less likely that a maintainer would end up storing a plain text password.

It is possible to do something like this in nearly any language with a type system.

g_delgado14• 6 years ago

None of this is unique to Rust - I can do this in typescript:

Serde -> Zod (https://github.com/vriad/zod)

Diesel -> Prisma

Yet you expose yourself to concepts that are unique to Rust that do not enhance the developer experience (such as lifetimes). I don't need to worry about lifetimes in typescript and can just focus on shipping code.

Lifetimes is just one example, but there are others that create more friction than they provide benefit IMO.

steveklabnik8• 6 years ago

I agree that Express/Slim/Flask is a better comparison.

But, to answer your core question, there are a few different reasons:

* Performance. The simple, straightforward Rust code will often be much faster than the usual suspects here. Sometimes, I/O is your bottleneck, but sometimes it's not. Maybe you only move some backend services over. npm is an example of a company that did this; some high performance services were implemented in Rust because Node was struggling.

* Consistency. Resource usage tends to be very flat. This helps with things like capacity planning, but also reliability (which is a later bullet point).

* Cost. This is directly related to performance, but also on a different axis: memory usage. We've seen people switch code to Rust, and while the performance doesn't change things for end users, the extra overhead means smaller servers, or less servers, which translates directly into $$$. There are some big, not super public success stories here I wish I could tell you about, but a public example is Rubygems. They had a lambda doing some log processing, and the performance benefit of Rust made things fast enough to move it onto lambda's free tier. Infinity savings! (Though of course it was actually from $12,000/year -> $0)

* Reliability. Back to the npm use-case, they had a lot of ops issues with Node. The Rust code ran for something like a year, year and a half, before ever having a single production issue. Static typing helps here, less variable resource usage helps here.

* Static types. Some people have come to prefer developing in a language with static types. Rust doesn't have a monopoly here, but it is among very few languages that have many of its features, and many of them don't check those previous boxes.

Of course, things aren't a panacea either. The ecosystem isn't as mature, even if this web page says it is. Async is great, but not perfect. Some people really do not like static types. Etc.

40four3• 6 years ago

I'll admit, the performance benchmarks on actix-web are very impressive!

Thanks for the detailed response, I have an eyebrow raised :)

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

Does Rust significantly outperform Java and C#?

Dowwie7• 6 years ago

I'll try to focus on a reason that Steve hasn't touched in his response -- investing in one's future.

I'm a generalist who wants to use great tools for my work. I've built a variety of systems, not just web applications, with Rust. The more I use the language, the more I learn and develop greater capabilities to do more unfamiliar work. I am on the fence right now about diving into video streaming/processing but already have a foundational knowledge that will lend useful to a Rust-based solution. Embedded product development, too. And mobile. Rust is being used everywhere, now, with success.

So, while you may get away with using slim for your web app, using Rust instead is a way of acquiring the skillset that is applicable across all software development. One may do web dev today, but security engineering tomorrow. Whatever the domain, Rust expertise carries over. Using Rust for web development is how you invest in a software engineering future. As a manager, one may argue that this is up to the programmer to do so in their own time, and not company time. Well, in response to that I recommend reading Steve's comment as to why you can't afford not to use Rust going forward. :)

40four3• 6 years ago

Thanks for the details! I have been interested in branching out away from web dev, and Rust does seem like a good avenue for that.

ronanyeah• 6 years ago

I come from a Node.js background and picked up Rust about a year ago, after dabbling with Haskell, Elixir and Purescript.

---

Things I like:

- Modern type system. Sum types, Option type etc

- Strict compiler. If it compiles, it works.

- Great error messages.

- Mature package tooling. Cargo is at least as good as npm.

- Mature GraphQL packages.

- Decent cloud support. Github actions, Container guides.

---

I've been running it in production for a while, usually as a remote schema for Hasura: https://github.com/ronanyeah/rust-hasura

Deploy pipeline:

- Push to github

- Github action builds binary

- Github action pushes binary to AWS ECS in a container

- This triggers a rebuild of the AWS Fargate service which restarts with new Rust code

pjmlp2• 6 years ago

Only for certain kinds of workloads, definitely not for what I do with JavaEE/JakartaEE/LifeRay, ASP.NET (SharePOint, Sitecore) projects, alongside RDMS like DB2, SQL Server and Oracle.

ufmace• 6 years ago

Has anybody else actually clicked through some of the links to the topics that are supposedly ready?

Authentication/Authorization - for me, this means something like Rails Devise, which gets you a full set of routes, controllers, and views for user management, including correct session management, account creation, password reset, all using best-practices for handling passwords, session tokens, and reset workflows. Instead, we get a few cookie and JWT widgets. Nowhere near ready.

CMS - they list 3 static site generators. A static site generator is all well and good, but it's nowhere near being a CMS. They not only don't have a CMS, but don't even seem to know what a CMS is or that they need one and that a static site generator is not a substitute.

Database - it at least does have some okay ORMs. But do any web frameworks integrate with them to the extent that you can set up test databases and run test suites with them automatically? Do any of them support validations? Last I checked, Diesel's support for associations is pretty bare-bones.

I've tried out Rocket. It's all right for making relatively basic API apps. And it still doesn't build on Stable yet, though that's hopefully coming soon. I like Rust for a lot of things, but it has a long way to go before it can compete with full-fledged web frameworks.

gremlinsinc4• 6 years ago

Have you tried laravel?

One thing I hate about rails is devise.

laravel new app --jetstream

gets me an app with admin area, profile page, teams, my choice of livewire (like phoenix liveview), or vue + inertiajs (spa w/out vue-router i.e. using laravel's native router), I also get 2 factor built into the auth layer.

Might be 8 hours of work just to get rails to have all that laravel brings from the scaffold command for a new project.

gwbas1c2• 6 years ago

Is Rust web yet?

Only if you REALLY need it, like if you're embedding a web server into an existing Rust service. Otherwise, it's going to be very time consuming to do things that are straightforward in other languages.

(TLDR: A Rust++, or "Objective Rust" that simplifies some memory issues could make Rust web ready.)

For the past few months, my occasional hobby has been trying to learn Rust. BUT, I've also spent a considerable amount of time getting up to speed in NodeJS.

Regarding running Rust in the browser with WebAssembly: I've spent DAYS trying to figure out how to hook callbacks into the DOM cleanly. I basically went through the "Game of Life" walkthough, (https://rustwasm.github.io/docs/book/), and then ported all of the JavaScript sides into Rust. Trying to make registering a callback from the DOM as clean as implementing a button click handler in C# is just a nightmare.

The problem is that Rust just isn't good for complicated object graphs. This is where almost any language that's garbage collected, or uses some form of automatic reference counting, shines. And, if you're building a "normal" web application, Rust isn't going to have tangible performance advantage over Java / C# / NodeJS / Python. (Meaning, if you aren't running at Google Scale, there's no tangible performance advantage for Rust.)

Part of what happens in Rust is that it's very hard for a struct to reference itself so it can register event callbacks. You're forced to either make all users of the struct use reference counting, or you have to encapsulate a reference counted type used with callbacks. In a garbage collected language, this kind of hurdle isn't needed. In reference counted languages, registering event handlers just requires a weak reference to yourself to avoid cyclic loops. This is because GC / ARC languages assume the same memory model for all objects; which isn't the case in Rust.

Anyway, to make Rust easier to work with, it needs a way to trade some of the raw, "0-cost-abstraction" advantages for the advantages that come with GC / ARC languages. Need raw performance? Use pure Rust. Just need to get it done? Use a higher-level syntax.

Dowwie7• 6 years ago

People are making a mistake of evaluating Rust web development exclusively on the basis of performance. If you're doing web development professionally, using Rust will make you more productive and happy. The first few months onboarding with the language are challenging, but working with Rust is a very rewarding experience. The thing about Rust web dev expertise is that once you reach parity in capabilities with that of another language, there's no reason not to use Rust even where performance isn't absolutely necessary. There's no going back once you've gone down the Rust path because you'll be able to build better solutions with even greater velocity than if you were doing so with a dynamic language. Again, the first few months working with Rust are challenging, but it pays off!

gremlinsinc4• 6 years ago

So, is there a way for me to use an easy cli command like:

laravel new myapp --jetstream

And have SaaS style teams, admin area, authentication, 2-factor, tailwind layouts, and vue+inertia all configured for me, so I literally just need to build the unique feature parts and not worry about auth/sessions/etc?

Dowwie7• 6 years ago

The open source ecosystem isn't there yet. Actix web and rocket are best positioned to get there soonest. There comes a point where people invest effort into convenience projects such as command line boilerplate generation, but I don't think anyone using Rust right now has this as a priority. Rust crates and modules design make re-use and importing functionality straightforward and explicit. I am not aware of an admin area, but that may very well be what people contribute next. Actix web has the most robust ecosystem at the moment. You'll struggle less than I did because of it (I was an early adopter).

nivethan2• 6 years ago

I wrote a tutorial on making a web app and I have some thoughts in general about rust in the final chapter.

https://dev.to/krowemoh/a-web-app-in-rust-17-conclusion-1njd

For the most part you could replace most things with rust but you'll be rolling your own solutions for things that other frameworks already supply. Actix was great to use and has enough middleware that I feel comfortable using it.

I don't see any reason outside of desire though to use rust and actix, python and flask are basically the same thing but easier to write. Luckily I like the language and it is fun so for now I'll continue using it.

It could be rust will be better once you have business logic where the borrow checker could really shine, just making a simple crud is too much glue work such that any programming language would work.

mwcampbell3• 6 years ago

We all know Rust web frameworks can't go head to head with Rails or Django; in other words, they're probably not the best fit for typical CRUD applications. But what I wonder is if there's yet a Rust web framework or set of libraries that would be a good fit for the type of stateful real-time web application where Phoenix is such a good fit right now. That is, a framework based on something like the actor model, with fault tolerance and clustering, with WebSocket-based channels built atop those actors, and possibly topped off with a real-time thin-client system like Phoenix LiveView. Those things, plus a statically-typed AOT-compiled language with great runtime efficiency like Rust, would be a killer combination.

georgesC2• 6 years ago

I don't understand how people are jumping head first into a new technology that is so young. It reminds me of the different js frameworks fads. Why would you use that in production, with no decent level of certainties about the status of the project long term?

Web is high level scripting, and lower level languages can be used by those high level languages to provide the required speed. The performance of those languages do increase over time with new hardware and discoveries. You can hardly do better than the concise syntax of php or python, depending on your preferences, in terms of performance vs code length.

To me programming has always been about obeying the KISS principle. Does using rust for the web corresponds to that principle? I'm unconvinced. Compare rust code to php code. php might be slower to process big operations, but big operations shouldn't be left to php anyway. php is a high level scripting language. Contribute to php and writing an extension would be a better way to go in my opinion. This or another scripting language.

phizy• 6 years ago

Would you rather have an expert in Rust doing web programming in Rust, or a novice in JS doing web programming in JS?

The best language to use is the one you know how to use best. If you know all languages equally well that you're free to choose the ideal language for every project, then sure, that's the way to go.

georgesC2• 6 years ago

For web dev, I would rather have an expert in rust obviously, but I would also rather have an expert in php who expressly choose php over rust for the sake of the kiss principle. Plus he would probably be satisfied with a lower starting salary :-)

But you are right, reality often goes differently than what's thought to be ideal, which is why "perfect" solutions sometimes doesn't gets adopted in favor of a less perfect solution, which leaves the old "perfect" solution forgotten by history.

Is Rust web yet?

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