Rust needs a web framework

In my opinion you should for 99% of cases use Golang for your web backend. Any other languages there are tradeoffs you are making.

Go:

- very easy to learn and grok Go code

- static typing

- fast compilation

- single binary (easier deployment)

- strong standard library

- large library ecosystem

- go routines for concurrency

- highly performant

Maybe Java,Kotlin and C# but they are still an order of magnitude more complex and resource heavy than Go.

This is unnecessary gatekeeping. It also shows your lack of perspective. Or, rather, your lack of imagining other perspectives, probably.

Sure, rust is primarily a language aimed at systems programming. But it also is so much more (and also a cult).

* Its type system is excellent. Especially the lack of a "null". Even if, like me, you're fine with a GC, the type system alone is worth dealing with this insistent borrow-checker.

* Its multithreading is stellar. The borrow checker helps a lot in making it such.

* Its mutable/immutable model is highly practical. It's what makes the threading stellar and the type system more useful than in any other language I worked with.

* Its "oop" model is uncomfortable at first (coming from Ruby and Java) but forcing the "composition over inheritance" by not having inheritance is probably the best thing that can happen to "OOP". Every solution where I used inheritance, I shouldn't have.

* Its culture of "making the good way the easy way", being opinionated, and a community that adheres to this, is worth dealing with a thousand borrow-checker WTFs. cargo fmt, clippy, etc.

* Its build system that generates binaries that can just be "plopped" onto a server, "chmod +x" -ed, and ran is unprecedented.

I come from Ruby, Java, Javascript (typescript). I do a lot of Python, maintain some go services, have decades of PHP under the belt and occasionally dabble in some C and even C++. I can find my way around in a C# codebase and Objective-C. All have their strengths and weaknesses. Their place and use-cases.

But rust, for me, is the only "ecosystem" that ticks all checkboxes in nearly all situations. It has downsides, and I consider the borrow-checker to be one of them in a lot of my use-cases, but it's something I'm willing to deal with gladly, because rust's other benefits.

Arguably a louder “plop” due to size, but then you don’t have to chmod.

In fairness, I think a lot of this comes down to familiarity. I'm fairly familiar with `.clone()` and Arcs at this point, so they don't really change much in terms of ergonomics. Usually their usage is fairly obvious, and quite often my editor literally does magically type the `.clone()` calls through LSP fix commands. It's the same as, say, OCaml's insistence that recursion is better for complex loops than, say, `while` — it's not necessarily wrong, but if you're unfamiliar with the idea, it's going to feel weird.

More important to me is the ergonomics of the broader ecosystem, and that's something that Rust has done well, that other languages just don't seem to be interested in at all. Things like integrating testing into the standard workflow; working hard on getting the stdlib in good condition; having an excellent ecosystem of well-documented, usable libraries; or designing error messages and lints with a focus on getting people to understand how the language works and not just what they've done wrong this time. I've really missed that stuff whenever I've tried MLs. You mention, for example, REPLs, but a unit test is basically a saved REPL session that you can repeat every time you make a change.

I'm not trying to convince anyone that Rust is the best language in the world or something. I really like it, but I find it helpful to think in terms of object ownership even in non-Rust languages, and I can understand why for other people that sort of approach is unhelpful. But I would love to see other languages embrace its ergonomics more, or new languages created with that as their focus.