Rust is emerging as one of the best web programming languages out there.
Actix and Axum feel like Python's Flask.
Rust has decent Redis and connection pool libraries, but the SQL space needs more work. Diesel SQL is too ORM-y (I've never liked ORMs). While SQLx allows you to write "typechecked" SQL, it still has really annoying edge cases (WHERE IN clauses can't be typechecked, type bindings can get hairy, etc.)
I'm not very happy about the state of Rust's Elasticsearch libraries, either.
Rust probably needs a Rails/Django-like framework too for those that prefer a framework-oriented development lifecycle.
Rust also needs some observability frameworks. There are a few, but the choices are sparse.
I'd give Rust a 7.5/10 for web programming, and as far as the promise of the language goes, I'd give it an 11/10. Developing in Actix and Axum feels amazing. It's honestly better than Go and Python. The other pieces (database, API clients, etc.) will presumably get better in time.
And because of the way HTTP request flow logic is typically structured, 99.9% of the time you'll never hit Rust's borrow checker or have to worry about lifetimes. It's as if you've been given one of the best typed languages, best package managers, and nearly no tradeoffs. The server compiles down to a single static binary. It's multithreaded, and it's blindingly fast.
I'm picking Rust for every new web service I write these days.
This is obviously heavily biased, because there is no way any reasonable person would think Axum or Actix are like Flask. That's just not possible with a language like Rust. The Rust standard library is horrible compared to Python or Go.
You need more dependencies to build a simple APi in Rust than you need in Python, and Go combined.
Axum, tokio, serde, serde_json, anyhow, sqlx and probably 5 more to fix the bad standard library.
In Python and Go you can build web app with the standard library.
TBH after adding in a database, Rust is probably not that much faster than Go and Go has everything you need in the standard library, compiles to binary, and package manager doesn't matter cuz you don't need one using Go.
It is bad in the sense we need to reach out for external libraries to avoid manually writing all the boilerplate with handling errors, and any async runtime works, as long as it is tokio.
Show me some Rust web code that you think exemplifies what you are talking about. I think your example will speak for itself and close this argument. No reason to go back and forth.
This. People are sleeping on one of the biggest developments to hit backend. They'll know soon enough.
I'm too tired to respond to the two detractors, but it's hilarious that one of the arguments against Rust is pulling in packages. Some of the best packages, at that. I wonder if that's their argument against most other languages.
Big standard libraries are a mistake, because the language is forever left with shitty old design decisions. Python's standard library is full of crap.
I might just put together a side by side Flask / Go / Rust. It'll be so damning against Python and Go. Rust is the same LOC count, complexity, and yet is a nicer language, better type system, and is as fast as nginx.
Actix and Axum feel like Python's Flask.
Rust has decent Redis and connection pool libraries, but the SQL space needs more work. Diesel SQL is too ORM-y (I've never liked ORMs). While SQLx allows you to write "typechecked" SQL, it still has really annoying edge cases (WHERE IN clauses can't be typechecked, type bindings can get hairy, etc.)
I'm not very happy about the state of Rust's Elasticsearch libraries, either.
Rust probably needs a Rails/Django-like framework too for those that prefer a framework-oriented development lifecycle.
Rust also needs some observability frameworks. There are a few, but the choices are sparse.
I'd give Rust a 7.5/10 for web programming, and as far as the promise of the language goes, I'd give it an 11/10. Developing in Actix and Axum feels amazing. It's honestly better than Go and Python. The other pieces (database, API clients, etc.) will presumably get better in time.
And because of the way HTTP request flow logic is typically structured, 99.9% of the time you'll never hit Rust's borrow checker or have to worry about lifetimes. It's as if you've been given one of the best typed languages, best package managers, and nearly no tradeoffs. The server compiles down to a single static binary. It's multithreaded, and it's blindingly fast.
I'm picking Rust for every new web service I write these days.