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Rust needs a web framework

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Re: Rust needs a web framework

#201

Post by saghm »

jeroenvlek wrote: post #198
saghm wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What people fall in love with is the rigorous static typing, the Option monad, the exhaustive enums (which are just sum types in disguise), the traits (type classes in disguise), the borrow checker (a half-way house to immutability) etc. 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…

Strongly agree, yet debates about improving the ergonomics of the language, for which there clearly "is a market", seem to be hindered by those zealous activists. A minority, I'm certain, but vocal nonetheless. It really can be small stuff too, like hiding that nested generic "GC adjacent" type salad to be accessible only if you need it, via a type alias. Yes, I can define that myself, but the point is that a lot of…

I used to think that it was more likely that Rust would "expand upward" to provide the higher level syntax that people want in a language like I describe above, but it does seem like the language development has vastly slowed down in terms of big new features. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing; plenty of people didn't like how much churn there was in the first several years after Rust 1.0 came out. I personally didn't mind since I never ran into any significant breakage in what I worked on, but I definitely noticed a change in how open companies seemed to be to use Rust in any capacity coinciding with Rust's releases growing smaller on average; I think "frequency of major language features" is often used as a proxy for "language maturity".

At this point, I think a new language is more likely to provide this niche than Rust, and I also don't think that has to be a bad thing. Having Rust scoped more to lower-level programming where you're more worried about things like minimizing heap usage and avoiding copying strings or whatever rather than trying to be all things to all users might end up with a better experience in the long run.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#202

Post by pjmlp »

MrJohz wrote: post #192
pjmlp wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those people aren't aware that the type system is a feature from most ML derived languages since Standard ML is a thing. All of them with better ergonomics for Web development.

Do they really have better economics? (EDIT: ergonomics!) Last time I looked into OCaml, I struggled to find a way to interact with the database in a type-safe way, I never figured out which standard library I was meant to install, I was being encouraged to use 2-3 different project management tools (Dune + Esy + OPAM), and I gave up on writing tests. But at least there's a garbage collector! I realise these are all…

I guess you mean ergonomics.

Yes they do, unless you get your editor to magically type `.clone()` and `[A]Rc` all over the place.

Not to mention they don't need unsafe, or 3rd party crates to handle graphs.

Additionally, all of them have interpreters and REPLs alongside their compilers, streamlining the code-develop-debug loop.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#203

Post by cies »

andrewjf wrote: post #144
troad wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a fan of Rust for systems programming, but so many people are using Rust for things that are nothing even remotely close to systems programming. So many projects you see being written (or rewritten) in Rust are projects where I just think 'wait, why can't this just have a GC'? And then you look at the code base, and it's all Arc >s, and you can't help at marvel at this, since that's just GC, so what's the benefi…

I came to Rust from Ruby-on-Rails and I’m absolutely done with method_missing and finding nils and NoMethodError in production. This is not remotely a trade off I’m interested in making.

Having written some Rust and a lot of Ruby, I find Kotlin to be a really nice "typed Ruby". Just like Ruby, Kotlin is an OO language in the core that is really friendly to FP. It's terse (not as terse as Ruby, as there are types to specify); but MUCH terser that Java.

Kotlin is serious about null-safety.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#204

Post by mathw »

mrbonner wrote: post #189
troad wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a fan of Rust for systems programming, but so many people are using Rust for things that are nothing even remotely close to systems programming. So many projects you see being written (or rewritten) in Rust are projects where I just think 'wait, why can't this just have a GC'? And then you look at the code base, and it's all Arc >s, and you can't help at marvel at this, since that's just GC, so what's the benefi…

I think RC and clone are the way people begin to use Rust. While lots of criticism are against this usage for not idiomatic, it should be acceptable. Coming from Python, nodejs or Ruby, even RC and clone or stack based variables is still a magnitude faster than those languages. When it's about absolute control for performance you can drop down a notch to the borrow checker behavior.

That's an interesting perspective I'd not considered before. Maybe there are different "registers" of Rust, in the same sense that linguists talk about registers in human languages, where you use your language differently for different purposes.

And thus, maybe if you're writing something that doesn't need to be screamingly fast absolutely all the time there's a register of Rust where putting lots of things in Rc> is completely acceptable, in much the same way that you might use a lot of impolite words around your friends but you don't in front of your employer.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#205

Post by pantulis »

wokwokwok wrote: post #146

I'm not going to lie, my first response was: 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 tool…

> 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 idea of creating a "one man framework" like Rails in a systems programming language like Rust is a very tricky one. I don't think you can mimic the best productivity features of Rails without metaprogramming. Yes, you can do something like it, but the abstractions would leak all over the place making it uncomfortable for a Rust developer and not good enough for a Rails developer.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#206

Post by wonrax »

bsnnkv wrote: post #95
chowells wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are comfortable offloading mental effort to a compiler. Others suffer from anxiety at the suggestion.

I'm the other way around I guess - a lot of anxiety when I'm forced to touch fragile bits written in Ruby, Python and JS at work. Part of it might be the terrible tooling story in each of those language ecosystems as well. Last week I deployed a Ruby change where a missed comma between two strings in an array did not get picked up by any of the automated tooling or by 3 other team members who code reviewed my change,…

> I feel a lot of anxiety when I'm forced to touch fragile bits written in Ruby, Python, and JS.

I resonate with you even with TypeScript, since it's just annotating types but not the true value under the variable. You would have to go to a greater extent to make sure that everything from outside (library code, parsing HTTP responses, database queries, etc.) conforms to your annotated types. Even in the same project code created by other people, I often doubt the validity of the types, asking myself questions like: Should I validate this? What if this has already been validated, thus making mine a performance waste? Does this object contain extra sensitive information that could be leaked when used in a logger?

After having experience with Rust, working with TS feels like navigating a minefield where every refactor could detonate hidden bugs or behavior collectively accumulated by all the historic code and dependencies, small or large.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#207

Post by hobofan »

paulgb wrote: post #3

I was surprised not to see Rocket ( https://rocket.rs/ ) mentioned among the frameworks the author listed; I haven’t used it myself because I _like_ the more unopinionated axum/actix-web, but as I understand it its goals are much more in the vein of what the author wants in a batteries-included framework and it’s been around for a while now.

While Rocket was one of the earliest Rust frameworks that really pushed for good UX (via proc-macros), I think it has largely fallen out of favor in many parts of the community. For a very long time it required nightly Rust versions to build, which is a no-go for many people wanting to use a framework in a production setting. Also for a period of ~2 years it was stuck in a 0.5.0 release candidate limbo where the latest stable released version was significantly lagging behind the rest of Rust web frameworks (requiring nightly; no async support yet).

Maybe it will be better now after the 0.5 hump, but in general the development history of Rocket is something that dissuades me from using it when compared to e.g. Axum.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#208

Post by mathw »

satvikpendem wrote: post #169
CharlieDigital wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a lot of what people actually like about Rust, to be honest, is that it's essentially an ML language masquerading as a C-like, with a stellar packaging and tooling story. F# seems like a good option.

How is F# on non-Microsoft platforms, is it fully cross platform? I don't use C#, .NET, or F# so I have no idea about the ecosystem.

Yes F# has come along for the ride with modern .NET and it's as cross-platform as C# is. However, a lot of the really shiny .NET stuff is tooled up mostly for C# users, so it can be a challenge if you wanted to do something like a .NET MAUI (cross-platform GUI library) application in F# because the tooling and the content out there to teach you about it assumes C#.

F# can usually handle C# things - they put a lot of work into ensuring interop with new C# features - but the languages are from different paradigms so it is sometimes a bit awkward despite F#'s comprehensive OO support.

Personally I struggle a bit with F# because it doesn't have typeclasses, and a language that looks that much like Haskell but doesn't have typeclasses just feels weird to me.

Although it might get them... C# are looking at adding a traits-type feature (they don't seem to know what to call it yet, but the design's been kicking around the language team for ages now and keeps getting discussed), so F# could presumably piggyback on that if they wanted.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#210

Post by wiz21c »

troad wrote: post #87
devjab wrote: post #10

> I like to make silly things, and I also like to put in minimal effort for those silly things. I also like to make things in Rust… I think this part is perhaps the silliest part of a very silly article. If you really like to put in a minimal effort then why on earth would you use Rust? If you want efficiency, memory management and a compiled modern language just use Go. Then you won’t even need anything but the stan…

I am a fan of Rust for systems programming, but so many people are using Rust for things that are nothing even remotely close to systems programming. So many projects you see being written (or rewritten) in Rust are projects where I just think 'wait, why can't this just have a GC'? And then you look at the code base, and it's all Arc >s, and you can't help at marvel at this, since that's just GC, so what's the benefi…

I do some systems programming, use rust for that and I am exactly the person you describe :-)
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