This isn't trolling, it's my genuine ignorance- I thought Actix was the goto web framework for Rust? I don't do a whole lot of Rust and when I do it isn't http router type work so I'm out of the loop here.
- axum: 100k installs/day
- warp: 25k installs/day
- actix: 15k installs/day
- rocket: 7k installs/day
- tide: 1k installs/day
(For comparison, hyper - the HTTP library that most web frameworks use under the hood - is at 200k/day, many of which are using it for client rather than server functions. So unless there is another not-hyper-based framework out there, then I’d be moderately confident guessing that axum has >50% of the server market)
Rocket seemed to gain popularity for a bit but then there was some drama with the maintainer disappearing / not releasing 0.5 for a long time.
Meanwhile, quietly, the guys who did tokio (the most popular async runtime) released axum, which is compatible with tower middlewares. So they had tons of features pretty early.
I switched from actix to axum around 0.4 and updates have been very sensible and kept improving the DX.
Nowadays Axum is at the top for downloads number: https://www.arewewebyet.org/topics/frameworks/
There was like 3 uses of “unsafe” and the developer was being systematically attacked and harassed by the rust community for months.
It wasn’t “a bit”, nor would I call it “the usual”. The rust subreddit and discord literally organized brigading and harassment campaigns against the dude.
But for a lot of usecases this model is faster than Axum work stealing. I am not a super huge fan of hyper (on which Axum is based), I salute the work (it is impressive) but it is very clunky to use, the code is hard to read and usage is super opiniated.
Alternatively, Axum is built by the same people that made tokio, is work-stealing multi-threaded, and the Websocket code is async be default. It is just overall a better library.
They're probably both fine choices, I chose Axum because the middleware architecture was easier to grok and at the time I felt that staying under the tokio umbrella would be safer long term.