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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

I really, really, really, don't understand why people want to use Rust for CRUD/web stuff. Every GC language is better than Rust for CRUD/web when you are in the less than 10,000 users phase.

I understand why Rust is trying to shove its way into the CRUD/web space--that's where all the programming is. I just don't understand the converse.

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I cast glances at it every time my company's Python services break because of a runtime error that could have been caught with a better type system, or because they ran out of memory and need bigger boxes, or another developer has to spend a week debugging their environment to get the complex web of dependencies aligned for five minutes, or my laptop strains under the weight of a dozen docker containers attempting to shield all those system-level dependencies from each other, or a deployment fails because of bad tooling/dependency-management

Not all languages are as bad as Python, and Rust comes with a lot of other costs. But it's very seductive to think about a world where you build a static binary with a single command, the build always works no matter what system it's on, the binary always works on the target OS regardless of what else is or isn't installed, it will use 1/10 the memory, and most likely it will never have any runtime errors because you were made to handle them all already

(I realize Go has at least some of these benefits, but its type system is hard for me to stomach)

Go, C#, Java, any of those have the benefits you mention (some, at least) without sacrificing that much early productivity

> I realize Go has at least some of these benefits, but its type system is hard for me to stomach

Can you elaborate on the issues of Go's type system?

Biggest one is lack of null-safety. The preference for implicit value defaults, sketchy error-handling, and similar choices also rub me the wrong way. The whole thing just feels too fast-and-loose for my tastes

I'm the thousandth person to suggest this, but my ideal language for web servers and lots of other things would be Rust with a GC instead of a borrow-checker. But Rust has its unique killer-feature to thank for a lot of the traction it's gotten, so it's very possible this hypothetical language never would have taken off in the first place. We've got what we've got, languages are social constructs just as much as technical ones, maybe even more so

Kotlin and Scala exist

Kotlin still has the annoying points of any jvm lang. Gradle, weird ORM stuff etc.

C# exists

I've written a few backend APIs with rust and I have to disagree. Not only have the frameworks managed to get the ergonomics similar to your popular GC lang[0][1], the natural lack of shared mutable state of HTTP handlers means you very rarely have to encounter lifetimes and a lot of the language's advanced features. What's more, now when I go back to work with other languages, I can't help but notice the significant number of unit tests I'd not have had to write in Rust. It doesn't have a Rails and Django but it's an easy pick over anything at the language level.

A note on performance, Rust's the only langauge where I haven't had the need to update my unit test harnesses to `TRUNCATE` tables instead of creating/discarding a separate database per test on PostgresSQL.

I'll also like to mention the gem that is SQLx[1]. As someone who's never been satisfied with ORMs, type checked SQL queries that auto-populate your custom types is revolutionary. With the error-prone langauge-SQL boundary covered, I was surprised just how good it can get making use of the builtin PostgreSQL features. Almost to the point that amount of effort the community's put to building great tools like Prisma.js and <insert favorite ORM> feel like a fool's errand (at least so for PosgreSQL).

[0]: https://github.com/alexpusch/rust-magic-function-params

[1]: https://github.com/juhaku/utoipa

[3]: lib.rs/crates/sqlx

Rust does have some nice semantics that the last round of popular languages don't, mostly just due to age. I suspect that a decent amount of its popularity is owed to that. But obviously for something CRUDesq all the nice little affordances in the world can't prevent borrowing from putting it way behind any language with a mature framework. That indicates we could use a GC language with Rust's eye towards modern design but without Rust's more difficult bits. Though I haven't really tried Typescript- does it do anything like that?

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