Comment by dragonsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonsh | Hacker News Reader

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At present Rust's primary focus is systems programming language, it will take another 3-5 years to be a viable web programming that too in a niche area. I doubt the libraries will be mature enough to provide easy way to build the way other languages do.

If you know Ruby or Python or C# or Swift or Go language or Dart or TypeScript or JavaScript don't change to Rust yet. It's far far away from having similar library, documentation and developer eco-system.

I believe Haskell has more mature web development eco-system than Rust at present, but they also suffer from same issue most libraries do not have enough documentation and it's tiring to go through the library code to understand how to use it. But if you want to do Rust, why not try Haskell, you will learn much more and it offers a new way of functional programming. Indeed Rust, Swift, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript etc. all borrowed ideas from Haskell or OCaml. Indeed Rust was initially written in OCaml

Actix which is the most popular framework in Rust just had a core developer who left it and was dead for a while before community tried to revive it. [1] [2]

[1] https://words.steveklabnik.com/a-sad-day-for-rust

[2] https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1289

Oops, I'm writing web backends in Rust 5 years already and didn't know it's not "viable" yet.

Yes probably viable for you as an individual, this does not collate into viable for most. It’s still a niche inside a niche.

People are writing web backend in Haskell for decades, it is a viable choice for very specific niche of web development. Rust has miles to go before it can reach even that stage. At present elixir has much bigger eco-system than Rust.

I don't think the 'Rust is not as far along as backend web Haskell' is true in my (minimal) experience.

I've worked at one very small company and one very large company, and at both Rust was a much more serious/common consideration for web services than Haskell.

I doubt that has much to do about the merits of either language as a web back-end, and it's more about people not wanting to consider Haskell at all.

I absolutely agree - there's a lot of explaining when you have to choose the less traveled path, and it hurts there's a perception that both languages are intended for 'academic' or 'niche' purposes.

Why Rust is considered over Haskell in one of the organizations I've been with is because it has the performance/memory usage characteristics of C/C++, which is a requirement for certain services. Though for many projects I'd imagine they'd meet similar levels of resistance.

I think the fact that Haskell is more math than programming might also be related to that. I've been programming for a decade and still don't understand Haskell.

You have no experience and arguing with someone who has experience. Very impressive.

I disagree. The ecosystem needed for web development doesn't need to be large. One major framework with a lot of integration focused plugins (think SSO, LDAP, SQL, Kafka, etc) should be more than enough. In the JVM ecosystem Micronaut isn't even two years old and it is already a viable choice for a lot of use cases.

Event Crystal, which isn't even 1.0 yet, is easier to build a web server. The rust team just hasn't focussed on web programming as much as systems programming.

Its even the main example on Crystal's homepage: https://crystal-lang.org

Afaik there is no mature swagger version for Rust which is a no go if you do a lot of API services.

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