I am the author of “Rust Web Development” (Manning) [1] and I am using Rust now at my third job full time for “web development” (which is: for backend services).
What I like about Rust, and where it makes the biggest difference to my previous jobs, is the type system and the compiler.
I am using it currently to build distributed systems, using gRPC, adding GraphQL services etc. So there is enough there to take you started without having to rewrite everything yourself.
The community is great to get answers, even many crates have active GitHub discussions or Discord servers.
Sure, there are differences in axum, actix and others. But to be honest, will this impact your productivity all that much?
For some cases, the tooling could be more mature, but the language itself makes you more productive and you are having more fun with it. I also talk about it on the Software Engineering Radio podcast episode. [2]
So I can’t speak for frontend apps, or if you come from Go etc. But I have fun using it for my side projects, and in my day to day life for 3-4 years now, Rust had a substantial impact on the productivity of teams I am working at.
Rough edges are there, yes. Async is maybe not as easy as in Go, and you have to think about memory management more. But these tradeoffs are worth it for me.
Other languages I've used kind of give you this false sense of security and progress, but then suddenly you're troubleshooting some issue for hours and hours. With Rust, you might be troubleshooting the borrow checker for hours and hours (until you get a good grasp on the language), but once you're "Done", it really feels like it's complete and will run without many issues. It shifts some of the mental work to the left, but you're more often left with a feeling of accomplishment and "finished"-ness (at least in my experience).
What I like about Rust, and where it makes the biggest difference to my previous jobs, is the type system and the compiler.
I am using it currently to build distributed systems, using gRPC, adding GraphQL services etc. So there is enough there to take you started without having to rewrite everything yourself.
The community is great to get answers, even many crates have active GitHub discussions or Discord servers.
Sure, there are differences in axum, actix and others. But to be honest, will this impact your productivity all that much?
For some cases, the tooling could be more mature, but the language itself makes you more productive and you are having more fun with it. I also talk about it on the Software Engineering Radio podcast episode. [2]
So I can’t speak for frontend apps, or if you come from Go etc. But I have fun using it for my side projects, and in my day to day life for 3-4 years now, Rust had a substantial impact on the productivity of teams I am working at.
Rough edges are there, yes. Async is maybe not as easy as in Go, and you have to think about memory management more. But these tradeoffs are worth it for me.
[1]: https://www.manning.com/books/rust-web-development [2]: https://www.se-radio.net/2023/05/se-radio-562-bastian-gruber...