Don't know anything about Actix, but can confirm that Rocket is excellent. The actor abstraction is very interesting, though.
Anyone have any insight into how Actix and Rocket compare? I'm interested mostly in ergonomics and safety.
Anyone have any insight into how Actix and Rocket compare? I'm interested mostly in ergonomics and safety.
I'm not experienced with web services and my project was very limited for learning purposes, here my take away:
I like both and for me Rocket was way more ergonomic for creating routes dealing as if they're simple functions where input and output are dealt automatically with (from request and to response).
Actix advantage is actors and is easy to be fully async, I had some issues dealing with it but most of my troubles were extracting request data and building responses.
When actix-web will support magic as Rocket (once proc-macros becomes stable) then actix-web will have the edge if Rocket don't become async-ready and stable before.
For both it is only question of missing stable rust features and actix-web is already running on stable.
actix-web: - easy - async - stable
Rocket: - stupidly easy - sync - nightly
Other than Rocket being nightly, the other reason I switched to Actix was because Rocket doesn't have the ability to respond to requests directly within the middleware layer, you can only modify the response but not return early. This is pretty important with regards to CORS and trying to catch all OPTIONS requests. There are a few solutions of course, but all of them felt hacky or verbose.
I have no complaints with Actix yet.
from performance perspective, actix is faster than rocket on any type of load.