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Rust needs a web framework

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Re: Rust needs a web framework

#251

Post by Ygg2 »

berkes wrote: post #226
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…

> that are nothing even remotely close to systems programming 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, th…

> But it also is so much more (and also a cult).

Way to lose readers with memeish statements like that. That said it's in good company of cultists like Smalltalk and Lisp community ;)

> * Its "oop" model is uncomfortable at first (coming from Ruby and Java)

It's OOP in the sense it has polymorphism, and "methods" . It's not OOP in almost every other conceivable way.

It doesn't fit with static OOP of Java. It doesn't fit with dynamic OOP of Smalltalk and Ruby.

> It has downsides, and I consider the borrow-checker to be one of them

I wouldn't want Rust without borrow checker, and never figured this complaint.

Yes, it's uncomfortable and will prevent you from making some legal code.

Guess what? So will a seatbelt. You move too fast to reach something and it snaps you in place.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#252

Post by isosphere »

Doing my web stuff in Rust was fine but concurrency was a pain. A crate that abstracts web workers with transferrable types would help. After that you have to pick a component library of which there are few, and all are experimental. Making pretty, performant things is hard. Switching compontent libraries isn't easy. The backend stuff is a breeze, I think Rust is doing fine there.

I'm switching to Flutter for my UX needs. There's flutter-rust-bridge that binds Rust code concurrently without any headaches in the client, and I can deploy to the web, android, Linux, etc. with ease. Looks p. good out of the box. Got GRPC working quickly, am happy.

Using Rust in the client is nice because I have a single workspace that contains all of my business logic. Backend changes will cause errors in the client code if changes are necessary. The codebase is easy to refactor and trust. Dart ain't half bad.

I stayed away from Flutter at first because it doesn't respect the DOM etc but at this point I'm willing to sell my soul to the devil for how easy it is to make a great UX that deploys anywhere.

I don't love relying on something Google made, though. Feels a little like building a foundation on sand.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#253

Post by gbin »

madeofpalk wrote: post #248
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…

Is Rust only for "systems programming"?

I would say it shines when you have systems constraints, for example embedded & robotics work well with Rust. You cannot have a GC (either you don't have a heap or you cannot tolerate a GC pause resp.) but you still have the benefits of a good functional programming language to write your algorithms in.

The benefits are less obvious if you have less of those constraints: go is way way simpler to write large codebases for cloud applications in and still provide an excellent concurrency support. Python is way better for experimenting.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#254

Post by mike_hearn »

saghm wrote: post #148
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…

> 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…

> 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?

Popular languages don't really have evangelism or fans pushing it aggressively. Those are traits of smaller languages that don't interop well with other ecosystems so they need a lot of evangelism to build out the library ecosystem.

> there's a space for a higher-level language with most of what people like from Rust that has a (tracing) garbage collector

What non-memory management related things is it people like from Rust that is missing from, say, Java or Kotlin? Because those have great web frameworks that address all the features requested in the article and a whole lot more, there's good first class support for all major platforms, lots of documentation etc. These languages are also famously developer friendly with good error messages.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#255

Post by mike_hearn »

kelnos wrote: post #91
jvanderbot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the intersection of compiled performant and web is mostly filled by Go.

It would be great to introduce some competition there, then! (Not only because I think competition is good, but because I really do not enjoy writing Go.)

This thread is amusing.

Go look at job boards. The competition for Go, Rust, Django or whatever is Java+Spring. That's pretty much the industry standard unless you're in a Microsoft-only shop.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#257

Post by tcfhgj »

saghm wrote: post #148
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…

> 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…

Fast also means more CPU Ressource efficient.

I am all in for not wasting more and more resources.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#258

Post by zild3d »

bsnnkv wrote: post #64

So strange reading all the comments here saying that Rust is not a language for "lazy developers". I'm an incredibly lazy developer and Rust only makes me lazier. I can pretty much turn off the part of my brain that deals with "programming language" stuff and put all that energy towards the part of my brain that deals with "building stuff" whenever I write code in Rust, because I have a high level of confidence that…

> It doesn't get any lazier than that.

Uhh have you tried Cursor compose?

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#260

Post by jokethrowaway »

That's interesting! I absolutely don't feel the need for a massive framework.

I think a good part of the devs community has been burned by some framework at some point and doesn't feel the need for web frameworks, hence why nobody bothered to make Rails for rust. In a professional setting, all the services I interact with, have been implemented on top of express (node.js) or fast-api (python). I know people working in ecommerce who rely heavily on django or woocommerce, but rust usage among them is pretty low.

Rust is also one language where there are very little junior people, so you'll see wire-it-yourself library more than frameworks. Eg. sqlx is imho the best compromise in the ORM vs query builder vs plain sql debate: you get typechecked plain sql.

I think axum is very well architected and type checked routes offer a great DX (except for the tower::Service compatibility - sure, it's nice to have compatibility but the resulting code is quite clunky), and I'd rather have smaller components I understand over a huge black box.

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