> I don't get how someone could think making a CRUD app in Rust could ever be a good idea (beyond hobby projects).
Me either, and I've said that before on HN. There is, however, a Rust lobby for CRUD apps. Those are the people who are pushing hard for "async". "Async" has its uses, but you don't really need it unless the load on your server has many thousands of concurrent connections, most of which are waiting. The OP here points out that his load is nowhere near that high. Python or node.js would work. Maybe even PHP.
If you need to write CRUD apps with high performance, use Go. That's what it's for. The libraries for what you need probably not only exist, but are running in production on warehouse-sized server farms.
I've been writing a metaverse client in Rust for two years, and I'm about 35,000 lines of safe Rust in. Separate threads are rendering, processing incoming messages from the network, updating the world state, fetching assets, and moving objects that are in motion, all in parallel. There's a lot of heavy machinery. Rust is good for this sort of highly concurrent problem. There have been no bugs in my code that required a debugger. (An early version of the rendering library I use, which is unsafe, caused trouble requiring using a debugger back in 2020. Took about 20 minutes to find the problem.) Rust is the right tool for the job for this sort of thing. I'd need a sizable team to do this in C++, and far more debugging.
As the original poster points out, and as some game devs have mentioned, the safety issues do slow development. You can paint yourself into a corner, where no easy fix will satisfy the ownership rules. It can take a week of rewriting to get out of that. Sometimes longer. Anything where an object needs a connection to its parent is unwieldy in Rust. You can do it, but soundness requires you do it through forward reference counted pointers and backwards weak pointers.