The first thought that should pop into your head is probably, why use this instead of language XYZ, where XYZ is Ruby/Java/Python/Go. It's actually a pretty interesting question because Rust is very much unlike those languages in the sense that it's a true systems programming language like C/C++ are.

No one would (should!) ever consider writing a webservice in C++, simply because it's unsafe to do so, it's much easier in other languages and the performance downsides of those languages don't matter any way (i.e. Ruby powers a bunch of high throughput websites yet it's notoriously 200x slower than any other language).

But here comes Rust, it takes away the unsafety, arguably being even safer than the managed languages in some aspects, is (in most aspects) easier to use than C++ (coming close to the managed languages in ease of use), yet has similar performance aspects (theoretically identical performance aspects) to C/C++.

There's a web gateway in our cluster that receives binary blobs over REST and puts them onto the message queue. In total not much over 100 lines of Ruby. We've thought about reducing the server load a bit by porting it to Go or some other more performant language. We probably wouldn't go for Rust, since Go is simply easier to learn (should a new person ever have to perform maintenance). Just the possibility of implementing it in Rust in roughly the same timespan and code complexity while having a theoretically optimal performance is very interesting.