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Rust is rather painful compared to alternative choices for web servers today. I’ve had to write 10x the code in some circumstances for the same result and I fi

Rust is rather painful compared to alternative choices for web servers today. I’ve had to write 10x the code in some circumstances for the same result and I find it becomes hard to reason when you have several async types. However, it has attributes that match it extremely well with function as a service where memory usage, cold start times, consistent execution, and compute costs are major factors. It’s extremely well suited to that environment. I expect to see it thrive here once some aspects of rust settle down further.

brundolf 5y ago
Yeah, the web framework situation is also just fairly early right now. Rocket looks promising but it's not at 1.0 yet, and the current release still requires the nightly compiler. It does a whole lot to improve the ergonomics, but even then it's not as easy as Python or Go. So it depends on the usecase. The good news is that the microservices trend makes it easy to optimize the "hot services" with a different language than what you use to throw together all your normal services.
- akiselev 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it as "easy" as Python or Go but I've been writing production services off the Rocket master branch (all async and compiles on stable rust but the API itself is rather unstable) for the last few months and it's been easily as productive as Django (sans ORM & django-admin integration). 80-90% of my logic is in request guard implementations and diesel types/helpers which get reused all over the place, making the controller logic trivially simple. Reimplementing most of the bells and whistles took less time than trying to decipher Django's magic anytime it goes wrong. Rocket's DI and middleware layer with serde, validator, Rust's error handling, etc really take the pain out of the whole affair. That said I wouldn't recommend it until the ecosystem matures and stabilizes unless you really like updating lifetimes all over rocket libraries every few months.

brundolf 5y ago

Yeah, the web framework situation is also just fairly early right now. Rocket looks promising but it's not at 1.0 yet, and the current release still requires the nightly compiler. It does a whole lot to improve the ergonomics, but even then it's not as easy as Python or Go. So it depends on the usecase. The good news is that the microservices trend makes it easy to optimize the "hot services" with a different language than what you use to throw together all your normal services.

akiselev 5y ago
I wouldn't call it as "easy" as Python or Go but I've been writing production services off the Rocket master branch (all async and compiles on stable rust but the API itself is rather unstable) for the last few months and it's been easily as productive as Django (sans ORM & django-admin integration). 80-90% of my logic is in request guard implementations and diesel types/helpers which get reused all over the place, making the controller logic trivially simple. Reimplementing most of the bells and whistles took less time than trying to decipher Django's magic anytime it goes wrong. Rocket's DI and middleware layer with serde, validator, Rust's error handling, etc really take the pain out of the whole affair. That said I wouldn't recommend it until the ecosystem matures and stabilizes unless you really like updating lifetimes all over rocket libraries every few months.