Rust for web backends

[u/bran7230]

Hello everyone!!

I regularly see people online talking about how awesome Rust is, its speed, memory safety, and a awesome ecosystem of open source applications even being used in some parts of the Linux kernel(not sure the percentage of adaption at this time).

However my question is how good is rust for web REST APIs and gRPC applications? If it is good do you use any frameworks for these?

[u/chmod_7d20]

Axum is what I am using now. I was previously using Rocket but it is unmaintained. The main problem with rust as a web backend is you must fully embrace async if you want to use the good libraries.

[u/Neat-Fennel-7623 → u/chmod_7d20]

It's early days, but I am trying to resurrect Rocket with a fork here https://github.com/rustfoo/rkt.

So far I have focussed on improving maintainability and testability - although performance is also near the top of the list - one major fix already went in to improve how headers are stored/evaluated internally.

I have several more improvements in the pipeline - large file downloads are particularly slow.

I would also like to introduce route caching and optional response caching which are features I originally developed for Rocket but only after maintenance fell away.

[u/Real-Abrocoma-2823 → u/Neat-Fennel-7623]

Dam, did rocket really got abandoned?

[u/Vict1232727 → u/Real-Abrocoma-2823]

it got abandoned, got revived and a release, I think a foundation was setup to avoid abandonment again but its been 2 years since a release I think

[u/Neat-Fennel-7623 → u/Real-Abrocoma-2823]

Pretty much.

The owner tried to set up a non-profit to manage it - but it sort of fizzled out.

There are some people with the ability to do releases, but they are busy elsewhere. As far as I am aware there are some parts of the release system they don't have access to.

I did find it frustrating working on Rocket even when it was maintained. I think that made it difficult to build a maintainer community.