Rust needs a web framework

Not having to learn something like PHP? Do we not count learning C++? I would guess most people would agree learning PHP + Nginx is going to be a lot less complicated, which will be preferable for people just trying to build something. I'm not sure dropping down to such a low level is something most web developers will have to deal with.

I think that you find it easy speaks more to an already existing familiarity with C++, not that it would be a path of less resistance.

This is not remotely a trade off I’m interested in making.

Wait, what, you think we need another web framework?

.....buuuut, if you spend more than 5 second actually reading the article...

> This doesn't exist right now, and I'm not sure if anyone else is working on it. All paths seem to lead me toward "whoops I guess I'm building a web framework." I hope someone else builds one, too, so we can have multiple options.

...

> My toolkit is called nicole's web toolkit, or newt. It's available in a public repository, but it's really not usable (the latest changes aren't even pushed yet). It's not even usable for me yet—this isn't a launch post, more shipping my design doc

ie. -> https://git.sr.ht/~ntietz/newt/tree

Is where you can find the code, for what they're trying to make, to fill this gap.

Sure. Not a web framework. An all in one opinionated good out of the box defaults like rails.

Yes, there's no django/rails for rust.

Or go. Or clojure.

In fact, a lot of people have tried to make all-in-one frameworks, but usually the way the wind blows is that doing something specific is easy, but doing something flexible and generic is hard, a lot of work, and unless you're being paid to do it, it's a loveless job that eventually you get sick of and abandon.

I feel like if you're really going to go and write a rails clone, you need to spend a little bit of time digging into some of the other failed attempts and reasons they failed (eg. 1, 2, 3) first.

The landscape is littered with aborted rails clones.

It's perhaps... fun, but ultimately futile and naive, to think you can be 'the one that makes it' when so many others have failed, if you don't take the time to understand why so very very very VERY many attempts to do this in many languages has failed.

(NB. Not to pick on clojure; I could have picked a bunch of go examples instead, but I guess the clojure failures have been particularly visible to me since I use clojure, and it's a place where, like rust, currently there are a lot of 'bits and pieces you can assemble yourself' and it feels like, surely just slapping them all together in one package can't be that hard...)

[1] - "Clojure needs a Rails" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32288291 [2] - "A Rails like framework for Clojure." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=822210 [3] - "Luminus – A Clojure Web Framework" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22852375

I feel like I say this every time this sort of discussion comes up, but I still think that there's a space for a higher-level language with most of what people like from Rust that has a (tracing) garbage collector and is slightly more relaxed with trying to design a way around every marginal heap allocation. Most of the time I bring this up, someone will suggest something like Swift or OCaml, but I think the part people miss is how even despite all of the complexity that comes with being a systems programming language, Rust really goes out of its way to try to be developer friendly despite that.

Yes, it's a meme that Rust programmers are zealous evangelists and want to rewrite the world in it (which is a bit of an exaggeration in terms of lumping all Rust enthusiasts into that group, but there's certainly an element of truth in it), but no one seems to talk about how _weird_ of an idea it is for a language notorious for having a terrible learning curve to be so popular with people perceived to be lacking real-world experience with the domain. How did a language that's supposed to be so hard get popular to the point where people view its fans as pushing it aggressively? You might chalk some of it up to marketing, but I think people undervalue how much effort is put into the little details in Rust to try to make it more approachable, like error messages, standard library documentation, first-class support for all major platforms, and high-quality introductory materials (e.g. both the original and rewritten The Rust Programming Language book, Rust by Example, Rustlings). I don't think the same experience is there if you want to use Swift on Linux (where the support isn't nearly as strong, and a lot of the fancy new things coming out won't be available) or OCaml (from googling right now, a debate on reddit about "which stdlib should I use as a beginner" is on the first page of results when I search "ocaml std" or "ocaml stdlib").