Fractalide: Simple Rust Microservices

An author here: we're working on the nixcrates project to remove cargo and allow for closer integration between nix and crates.io, so far you can check out the project at https://github.com/nixcloud/nixcrates (joachim and paul are super people, hit them up if you're interested in contracting them) the net/http stuff is currently incompatible with the most recent changeset, I'll get working on it tomorrow morning HKT to make it work, I have to refactor it to suit the new stabilized API. Anyway, this attention was a bit earlier than expected, still have a couple of weeks to go before stabilizing. I hope you guys can kick the tires, tell us what you don't understand and please comment on the API because we want something sensible. We're using the late Pieter Hintjens' C4 so please hop on board and collaborate!

Most documentation is in the form of README files within the subdirectories; here is the code auto-docs: https://docs.rs/fractalide

Looks like knowledge of the nix distribution system is required to use. I don't know how hard it would be, but a neat auxiliary project would be a cargo plugin that supports fetching packages though nix.

The "net/http" fractal definition [0] references the repository https://github.com/fractalide/fractal_net_http, which is where the rust microservice code actualy lives.

There is an example TODO app in the https://github.com/fractalide root dir (split between fractal_app_todo_{,model,controller}).

Upon further inspection, this seems to be "simple nix microservices" that happen to be implemented in rust. One of the goals is to "remove cargo", and they use `nix-build` over `cargo build`. Also, a lot of implementation is in their 'flowscript' language within a lot of *.nix files [1] [2].

Interesting project nonetheless. Good luck to them!

[0]: https://gitlab.com/fractalide/fractalide/blob/master/fractal...

[1]: https://github.com/fractalide/fractal_app_todo/blob/master/c...

[2]: https://github.com/fractalide/fractal_app_todo/blob/master/c...

Not to discount any of the work being done here, but I'd love to see a stable rust grpc implementation.

Looks incredible. I for one cannot encourage enough, dataflow competitors to the current JVM lockdown on this space. A few questions:

a) will Fractalide support dynamic dataflow graph change at runtime?

b) For reasons of clarifying your objectives further, could you elaborate on your target market's current occupants? Is this Kafka / Flink for Rust?

c) What is your estimated timeframe for a feature-credible, testable release, even if beta?