Ask HN: Anyone using Rust for server side application development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone using Rust for server side application development?

17 pointschampagnepapi15 comments

Just curious if people have had positive experiences with it and how mature the eco system is.

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I don't know who uses it, but there is a site that has been tracking Rust's maturity for web servers for years.

https://www.arewewebyet.org

The answer wasn't "yes" until the last year or two.

yeah i personally don't know anyone using in production, so i was a bit curious. Thanks for the link :)

But what Rust web framework would not have showstopper bugs like this?

a) Actix Web

https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/2810

https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/2782

https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/2774

b) Rocket

https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket/issues/1405

c) Warp

https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp/issues/937

https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp/issues/798

d) Tide

https://github.com/http-rs/tide/issues/853

Literally every web framework ever in every language has been littered with issues. What point are you trying to make?

I'm trying to find secure web framework. Is there any?

Most of these are "nice to have" security features or defaults rather than massive holes. Frameworks should have good security, but you also need to protect yourself from things like slow loris DoS in your own code. You need to add these protections when using any framework.

Sort of? I'm using it to launch a server to display preflight checks and user configuration for drones, with a web (HTML/CSS/JS) UI. It makes sense, since the drone firmware is programmed in rust, so I can share data structures. I'm using the Rocket framework for this.

I would not use Rust for a website, since its ecosystem is immature. Ie, things that many websites used require wheel-reinvention or stringing together libs. (Auth, admin, email, templating etc). And there's no high-level ORM, so managing changes to the DB is a pain, which leads to inertia. This isn't a spear at Rust's capability for use on a server; it doesn't have the ecosystem at this time. I don't know if it will in the future.

Not me, but Materialize has built a streaming query materialization solution completely in Rust AFAIK, and has raised around $100MM so far according to crunchbase.

https://materialize.com/

Super cool product.

- Actix Web https://github.com/actix/actix-web

- Axum https://github.com/tokio-rs/axum (what I'm currently using in production)

- Hyper https://github.com/hyperium/hyper

Positive experiences mostly. If it builds, it'll usually run with no issues. Ecosystem is mature enough for large production apps.

At Ditto (www.ditto.live) our entire server side core and the apps that use that core are written in Rust. No one has complained about any issues at all. I think our company loves Rust so much that they're just happy we didn't choose Java. I don't think the results would have been too different if we chose a more established server-side app framework or language, but the company is happy that we use Rust through and through.

There’s a very fast Matrix homeserver implementation written in Rust, called Conduit.

https://conduit.rs/

I’m not one of the developers, but I am looking at using it for work.

I've partially written up how I use rust for server side full stack web development.

https://rust-on-nails.com

https://mayhem4api.forallsecure.com is using actix web with diesel for backend.

I've found that rust developers are spending far too much time rewriting other applications than writing their own apps.

I can see a possible reason behind it: Learning a new language alongside a new problem domain is hard. So it’s possible that some of these projects started out as a way to learn Rust in a problem domain they’re already familiar with.

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