7 ms·

> it may become less attractive for other use cases. For instance, I find it highly questionable to develop a web app in Rust... I mean who'd want to and why b

> it may become less attractive for other use cases. For instance, I find it highly questionable to develop a web app in Rust... I mean who'd want to and why bother trying to support that use case? Basically none of Rust's value proposition exists for a web app while nearly every single one of the downsides do.

inferiorhuman 3y ago
Hard disagree. Rust brings a lot to the table for a web app. Compiled vs interpreted makes it easier to catch (syntax) errors beforehand. You can even go as far as compiled templates. Mapping JSON (or whatever) to strongly typed objects is great. Dependency management is best in class. I rather like diesel.rs (although it is very much an acquired taste) especially if you treat it like a safe query builder rather than an ORM. The single biggest problem I've run into is that there's no real good story for a web app framework (especially since everyone's gone crazy over async). Rocket is perhaps a bit too magical for rust folks and it's been abandoned, but I rather liked it. I've warmed up to axum, but all this async stuff still rubs me the wrong way. And, yes, compile times still suck.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Arguably TypeScript is pretty close to as safe while being less work.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Perhaps. But TS is still Javascript under the hood which means implementation details leak and they smell awful. If they didn't it'd come down to a preference for compiled vs interpreted. The number one syntactical beef I've is operators. e.g. == vs ===, ""+number.
- vsnf 3y ago
  Although all of those things are true, I think the main point being made is why choose Rust for that, instead of Go, .NET, etc, any of which offer everything you've outlined as being worth having, while having fewer of the downsides of Rust.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    any of which offer everything you've outlined They don't, that's the "problem". Off the top of my head dependency management in Go is not best in class to put it charitably. .NET will tie you more closely to Windows. Sure, mono is a thing but you'll have more packages to choose from and fewer compatibility issues running .NET on Windows.
    - foobarbaz33 3y ago
      Mono? 2000 and late called and want their .NET implementation back. Now it's all about the .NET formerly known as "Core".
    - Merad 3y ago
      Your knowledge of the .Net ecosystem is a bit out of date. It's had first class support for mac and linux for 7-8 years now.
      - scns 3y ago
        First class support on Linux and Mac with caveats. Zero snark intended.
    - Paradigma11 3y ago
      Web development for .NET is multiplatform for quite some years now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET Mono is mostly only relevant if you need platform specific capabilities that wont be covered in .NET.
  - LinXitoW 3y ago
    To me, one thing missing from most popular web languages is the single best part of Rust: A well-defined handling of the non-happy path. I'm talking about things like exhaustive "switches", built-in, ENFORCED handling of "missing" values (null, undefined), and finally useful error handling. I actually don't need any of the baremetal features of Rust. It's just that most of it's "zero-cost" abstractions are still far superior to those of other languages.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  > Dependency management is best in class Do crates have namespaces that ownership is verified for?
  - geodel 3y ago
    Crate namespaces is best-in-class++ feature and currently not available.
    - EdwardDiego 3y ago
      Yeah, I ask because the JVM world has had that since... whenever Maven's central repository came about [0][1][2], I guess, and it ensures that there's no debate about namesquatting [3], nor typosquatting attack vectors [4]. I am constantly baffled that NPM, PyPi, crates.io etc. didn't copy this idea for those last two reasons. In my mind, it's not quite best in class without it. [0]: https://central.sonatype.org/publish/requirements/coordinates/#choose-your-coordinates https://central.sonatype.org/publish/requirements/coordinate... [1]: https://central.sonatype.org/faq/how-to-set-txt-record/ https://central.sonatype.org/faq/how-to-set-txt-record/ [2]: https://central.sonatype.org/publish/requirements/coordinates/#supported-code-hosting-services-for-personal-groupid https://central.sonatype.org/publish/requirements/coordinate... [3]: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-formal-squatting-policy-on-crates-io/11302 https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-formal-squatting-p... [4]: https://blog.sonatype.com/this-week-in-malware-may-13th-edition https://blog.sonatype.com/this-week-in-malware-may-13th-edit...
- pjc50 3y ago
  > Compiled vs interpreted makes it easier to catch (syntax) errors beforehand. ... Mapping JSON (or whatever) to strongly typed objects is great cough C#. You also get LINQ. And a fairly heavy amount of web frameworks in ASP.NET / Razor.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Or Java, F#, Scala, Kotlin, Haskell. If we were to randomly pick a language, chances are it could be a good fit for these — Rust became as well-known as is because it was made for a different niche, where there were no competition.
    - moi2388 3y ago
      Haskell is a beautiful language, but I find their web frameworks rather cumbersome to work with personally.
    - EdwardDiego 3y ago
      Hell, even Python can map JSON to a strongly typed object. I am a firm fan of Pydantic and its competitors when dealing with JSON blobs. No-one deserves a KeyError in prod code.
arlcode 3y ago
I am doing that for a just for fun side project and it was an interesting experience. The pieces and features i wanted exist but tying them together was not always straight forward. From the top of my head I used: - actix-web - tracing (logging) - sea-orm - config from yaml files and a custom implementation to allow profiles. - utoipa (for openapi and swagger ui) - thiserror In a professional context I would not have used Rust for this project, but it was quite fun to explore it's possibilities and rich crate ecosystem.
FpUser 3y ago
>"I mean who'd want to and why bother trying to support that use case" I write my web apps in C++. They tend to be little bit more than just query database / update database. They're exposed as JSON based RPC and can be accessed by JS front end from browser or third party systems we interact with. The performance is stellar and the code size is not much different comparatively to using PHP / Ruby / Python / your_pet_goes_here.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Nice. Do you have some open source samples? I would like to see your style!
  - FpUser 3y ago
    No. I do not work on opensource projects unfortunately.

inferiorhuman 3y ago

Hard disagree. Rust brings a lot to the table for a web app. Compiled vs interpreted makes it easier to catch (syntax) errors beforehand. You can even go as far as compiled templates. Mapping JSON (or whatever) to strongly typed objects is great. Dependency management is best in class. I rather like diesel.rs (although it is very much an acquired taste) especially if you treat it like a safe query builder rather than an ORM. The single biggest problem I've run into is that there's no real good story for a web app framework (especially since everyone's gone crazy over async). Rocket is perhaps a bit too magical for rust folks and it's been abandoned, but I rather liked it. I've warmed up to axum, but all this async stuff still rubs me the wrong way. And, yes, compile times still suck.

Gigachad 3y ago
Arguably TypeScript is pretty close to as safe while being less work.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Perhaps. But TS is still Javascript under the hood which means implementation details leak and they smell awful. If they didn't it'd come down to a preference for compiled vs interpreted. The number one syntactical beef I've is operators. e.g. == vs ===, ""+number.
vsnf 3y ago
Although all of those things are true, I think the main point being made is why choose Rust for that, instead of Go, .NET, etc, any of which offer everything you've outlined as being worth having, while having fewer of the downsides of Rust.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  any of which offer everything you've outlined They don't, that's the "problem". Off the top of my head dependency management in Go is not best in class to put it charitably. .NET will tie you more closely to Windows. Sure, mono is a thing but you'll have more packages to choose from and fewer compatibility issues running .NET on Windows.
  - foobarbaz33 3y ago
    Mono? 2000 and late called and want their .NET implementation back. Now it's all about the .NET formerly known as "Core".
  - Merad 3y ago
    Your knowledge of the .Net ecosystem is a bit out of date. It's had first class support for mac and linux for 7-8 years now.
    - scns 3y ago
      First class support on Linux and Mac with caveats. Zero snark intended.
  - Paradigma11 3y ago
    Web development for .NET is multiplatform for quite some years now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET Mono is mostly only relevant if you need platform specific capabilities that wont be covered in .NET.
- LinXitoW 3y ago
  To me, one thing missing from most popular web languages is the single best part of Rust: A well-defined handling of the non-happy path. I'm talking about things like exhaustive "switches", built-in, ENFORCED handling of "missing" values (null, undefined), and finally useful error handling. I actually don't need any of the baremetal features of Rust. It's just that most of it's "zero-cost" abstractions are still far superior to those of other languages.
EdwardDiego 3y ago
> Dependency management is best in class Do crates have namespaces that ownership is verified for?
- geodel 3y ago
  Crate namespaces is best-in-class++ feature and currently not available.
  - EdwardDiego 3y ago
    Yeah, I ask because the JVM world has had that since... whenever Maven's central repository came about [0][1][2], I guess, and it ensures that there's no debate about namesquatting [3], nor typosquatting attack vectors [4]. I am constantly baffled that NPM, PyPi, crates.io etc. didn't copy this idea for those last two reasons. In my mind, it's not quite best in class without it. [0]: https://central.sonatype.org/publish/requirements/coordinates/#choose-your-coordinates https://central.sonatype.org/publish/requirements/coordinate... [1]: https://central.sonatype.org/faq/how-to-set-txt-record/ https://central.sonatype.org/faq/how-to-set-txt-record/ [2]: https://central.sonatype.org/publish/requirements/coordinates/#supported-code-hosting-services-for-personal-groupid https://central.sonatype.org/publish/requirements/coordinate... [3]: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-formal-squatting-policy-on-crates-io/11302 https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-formal-squatting-p... [4]: https://blog.sonatype.com/this-week-in-malware-may-13th-edition https://blog.sonatype.com/this-week-in-malware-may-13th-edit...
pjc50 3y ago
> Compiled vs interpreted makes it easier to catch (syntax) errors beforehand. ... Mapping JSON (or whatever) to strongly typed objects is great cough C#. You also get LINQ. And a fairly heavy amount of web frameworks in ASP.NET / Razor.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Or Java, F#, Scala, Kotlin, Haskell. If we were to randomly pick a language, chances are it could be a good fit for these — Rust became as well-known as is because it was made for a different niche, where there were no competition.
  - moi2388 3y ago
    Haskell is a beautiful language, but I find their web frameworks rather cumbersome to work with personally.
  - EdwardDiego 3y ago
    Hell, even Python can map JSON to a strongly typed object. I am a firm fan of Pydantic and its competitors when dealing with JSON blobs. No-one deserves a KeyError in prod code.

arlcode 3y ago

I am doing that for a just for fun side project and it was an interesting experience. The pieces and features i wanted exist but tying them together was not always straight forward. From the top of my head I used: - actix-web - tracing (logging) - sea-orm - config from yaml files and a custom implementation to allow profiles. - utoipa (for openapi and swagger ui) - thiserror In a professional context I would not have used Rust for this project, but it was quite fun to explore it's possibilities and rich crate ecosystem.

FpUser 3y ago

>"I mean who'd want to and why bother trying to support that use case" I write my web apps in C++. They tend to be little bit more than just query database / update database. They're exposed as JSON based RPC and can be accessed by JS front end from browser or third party systems we interact with. The performance is stellar and the code size is not much different comparatively to using PHP / Ruby / Python / your_pet_goes_here.

throwaway2037 3y ago
Nice. Do you have some open source samples? I would like to see your style!
- FpUser 3y ago
  No. I do not work on opensource projects unfortunately.