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Rocket v0.5: Stable, Async

rocket.rs

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Re: Rocket v0.5: Stable, Async

#21

Post by nicoburns »

tomas789 wrote: post #20
Qwuke wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand this - I think having different options for web frameworks is great for Rust! Actually, it's probably more useful for Rust than other languages because Rust ends up being used by such a different range of developers and applications, and each framework ends up having such different opinions and providing different levels of abstractions.

Rocket was created by Sergio Benitez. He is almost exclusively the only contributor to the project. Not because people don't want to contribute to it, but because the author wants to have it as sort of his child's brain. And there is nothing bad about that. But recently he said at a conference (as I read on Reddit) that he does not have much time anymore to invest in its development. That means that there is probably…

> He is almost exclusively the only contributor to the project. Not because people don't want to contribute to it, but because the author wants to have it as sort of his child's brain.

This has been the case, but the announcement of this release also came with the announcement of the creation of a non-profit foundation to own the Rocket project, and the opening up of development / maintainership to the community

Re: Rocket v0.5: Stable, Async

#22

Post by garyrob »

Alifatisk wrote: post #12
pzmarzly wrote: post #7

I was developing a fairly large web app with Rocket 0.4 (released 2018!) and it started as a good experience, but then I was burned by the lack of support for multipart forms (i.e. file uploads), poor async, no option to listen on unix socket (required by my hosting provider's proxy) and long compilation times (not fully fault of Rocket, Rust compiler team has done a lot to speed up compilation since then). In the en…

> I learned that perhaps Rust is not the right choice to make full-stack web apps and rewrote everything to Laravel (PHP) and Vue (JS). I fully agree with you on this one and people have been saying this for a long time now, Rust and its kind has its place. Full stack web framework is not one of them.

His point seems to have been that while version .4 had those missing pieces, the problems he mentions have now been addressed in .5. Maybe Full stack web with rust is more imaginable now. In any case, I plan to try it.

Re: Rocket v0.5: Stable, Async

#23

Post by unshavedyak »

Dig1t wrote: post #14

I like the idea of Rust, its technical merits etc, but good lord this language has some crazy weird and intimidating syntax. I read the code snippets and am just confused as heck. Did it really have to look like this?

I'd be curious how you rewrite the syntax to have the same features but less syntax choices. Especially if it was made in the same way, organic evolution over the years.

I suspect it might look different. Not better or worse, just.. different. Same core complaints.

Now what if it was written from scratch today? That would prob miss a lot of the warts you don't like. But it still represents a lot of complexity in all the features the language presents, so it wouldn't be Python - for sure.

Personally i love the syntax, but /shrug

Re: Rocket v0.5: Stable, Async

#24

Post by spoiler »

ufmace wrote: post #19
pzmarzly wrote: post #7

I was developing a fairly large web app with Rocket 0.4 (released 2018!) and it started as a good experience, but then I was burned by the lack of support for multipart forms (i.e. file uploads), poor async, no option to listen on unix socket (required by my hosting provider's proxy) and long compilation times (not fully fault of Rocket, Rust compiler team has done a lot to speed up compilation since then). In the en…

> perhaps Rust is not the right choice to make full-stack web apps This is a good step, but I still wonder if this is the case. I do like some aspects of writing webapps in Rust, but the ecosystem for serious web apps is still woefully immature. There just aren't battle-tested and well-supported solutions for many critical things, including tracing, monitoring, security, etc.

The `tracing` ecosystem is IMO pretty good, and even works with Sentry for various frameworks (well largely it's all tower based anyway)

Not sure what you mean by monitoring. What do you expect (and do you have any examples where other languages provide monitoring solutions?).

Security wise, I've not had any issues finding crates for specific things I needed either, but security is a broad domain (so what did you find lacking in particular?)

Re: Rocket v0.5: Stable, Async

#25

Post by tomas789 »

nicoburns wrote: post #21
tomas789 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rocket was created by Sergio Benitez. He is almost exclusively the only contributor to the project. Not because people don't want to contribute to it, but because the author wants to have it as sort of his child's brain. And there is nothing bad about that. But recently he said at a conference (as I read on Reddit) that he does not have much time anymore to invest in its development. That means that there is probably…

> He is almost exclusively the only contributor to the project. Not because people don't want to contribute to it, but because the author wants to have it as sort of his child's brain. This has been the case, but the announcement of this release also came with the announcement of the creation of a non-profit foundation to own the Rocket project, and the opening up of development / maintainership to the community

You're right. I did not see the announcement [1] before. This can possibly make all the difference.

[1] https://rocket.rs/v0.5/news/2023-11-17-rwf2-prelaunch/

Re: Rocket v0.5: Stable, Async

#27

Post by speed_spread »

tomas789 wrote: post #5

Hate to say that but I’d be happier if this never happened. I think many newcomers think that Rocket is “the web framework” in Rust. And if author goes silent again they will be let down. It casts kinda bad shadow on Rust community but we have better alternatives.

This is the kind of problem that can solve itself, if enough people adopt a project and depend on it, its maintenance can be organized. It helps if the original author is willing to help with the transition to a community-maintained project, which seems to be the case with Rocket.

Re: Rocket v0.5: Stable, Async

#28

Post by [deleted] »

tomas789 wrote: post #20
Qwuke wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand this - I think having different options for web frameworks is great for Rust! Actually, it's probably more useful for Rust than other languages because Rust ends up being used by such a different range of developers and applications, and each framework ends up having such different opinions and providing different levels of abstractions.

Rocket was created by Sergio Benitez. He is almost exclusively the only contributor to the project. Not because people don't want to contribute to it, but because the author wants to have it as sort of his child's brain. And there is nothing bad about that. But recently he said at a conference (as I read on Reddit) that he does not have much time anymore to invest in its development. That means that there is probably…

[deleted]

Re: Rocket v0.5: Stable, Async

#29

Post by Qwuke »

tomas789 wrote: post #20
Qwuke wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand this - I think having different options for web frameworks is great for Rust! Actually, it's probably more useful for Rust than other languages because Rust ends up being used by such a different range of developers and applications, and each framework ends up having such different opinions and providing different levels of abstractions.

Rocket was created by Sergio Benitez. He is almost exclusively the only contributor to the project. Not because people don't want to contribute to it, but because the author wants to have it as sort of his child's brain. And there is nothing bad about that. But recently he said at a conference (as I read on Reddit) that he does not have much time anymore to invest in its development. That means that there is probably…

>Rocket was created by Sergio Benitez. He is almost exclusively the only contributor to the project. Not because people don't want to contribute to it, but because the author wants to have it as sort of his child's brain.

I've talked to Sergio before in-person and got a completely different take of how he views contributions, but also, apparently he's explicitly trying to democratize Rocket's governance as part of this new stream of updates. I think the 0.5 release is a good sign he's doing his best to maintain his flavor of framework despite time constraints.

>I think that a website or API backend is the first project for many newcomers to Rust. It would be better for them to have first experience with other frameworks such that they are not let down by Rocket as it might cast a bad light at the whole ecosystem.

I guess your experience with it being a let down is contrasted with mine of how the 0.5 release candidates have been great to make web apps with - especially for new comers who want to experience a very ergonomic "secure by default" web framework in a language that makes major promises about safety, but also where encountering new behaviors with the Rust compiler can be an impediment from writing anything in the language.

>Rocket looks tempting because a/ it has a nice website b/ it looks feature complete c/ it is similar to Django/Flask which might make it more familiar d/ other web frameworks don't have particularly appealing documentation.

Perhaps we should spend some time as a community to make a website showing some examples and pros and cons of the various web frameworks. A good example to show newcomers that might help them choose a framework is demonstrating error messaging that some macros in Rocket emit vs a similar error in Axum that wouldn't ever have an error. Or showing them tower middleware crate ecosystem vs the middleware ecosystem in Rocket (or which parts of rocket that don't even need middleware or setup vs Axum) - not by hoping that the developer puts less effort in the project or kills it, which takes the options away from the community.

If I started on a website that does that, would you be willing to provide me some feedback? I'd be happy to take on that burden if there's a lack of a single, good resource for it.

Re: Rocket v0.5: Stable, Async

#30

Post by speed_spread »

Dig1t wrote: post #14

I like the idea of Rust, its technical merits etc, but good lord this language has some crazy weird and intimidating syntax. I read the code snippets and am just confused as heck. Did it really have to look like this?

It really depends on where you're coming from and if you understand the problems Rust is trying to solve. Rust is a strongly typed language that promotes explicitness over ambiguity, making actual application code look quite different from JS or Python which provide a lot of shortcuts but also have plenty of hidden trapdoors.

Some say that Rust naming conventions actually uses snake_case in variables because each underscore is a little trapdoor that's made apparent so you don't fall in it!

Being mainly imperative with some functional and OO niceties, it's also much less weird than many other languages. Try reading some Haskell or Erlang before judging how weird a language looks...

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