Is Rust really suitable for web development? I am genuinely asking.
For server development I think it might be a good choice, but for application code itself it seems like more of a pain to program in than an advantage.
For server development I think it might be a good choice, but for application code itself it seems like more of a pain to program in than an advantage.
Up until now, I've only ever used interpreted, dynamic languages for web development. In contrast, Rust offers me a tight memory footprint (no silly things like unicorn-worker-killer), high performance (the average response time for most of my Rails apps is 150ms), and a slew of static guarantees about types (no "undefined method for nil:NilClass") and memory safety. It also has some really cool things like sanitary macros and syntax extensions that have allowed me to build out a fairly simple yet robust ORM similar to ActiveRecord in look and feel.
I may be forcing a square peg into a circle hole; all my current work is experimental.
Can you clarify on the difference between "server development" and "application code"? In this context, I've always considered those terms to be the same.
Edit: I think I understand what you mean by application code — business logic code? Reasonable concerns. I don't have much to say yet (I'm just doing framework stuff now in preparation for real applications), but here's a demo of my aforementioned ORM in action[2].
[2] https://gist.github.com/SkylerLipthay/9015e6c79859e7dc8709
Rust is good for extending Python, Ruby, etc stuff. More safe than C.
Server side you have many more good choices, but Rust does have a nice FFI story in both directions.
Whether you want to write your entire app in Rust is a different question. I'd want to get more experience with Rust before answering that question -- writing a performance sensitive portion in Rust first would go a long way to answering that question.
Nobody wants to code C++ for webservers because of the risk (PayPal not included) but Rust doesn't have that issue.
The fact that Rust requires that you think about memory management made it feel less expressive and less productive. The strictness of the compiler also got in the way of "productivity". There's nothing wrong with that strictness, but in the domain of web-development where productivity and expressiveness is often more valued than raw performance Rust doesn't feel like the optimal tool.
To use Rust for web-development feels like a premature optimization.
I think for web-development, it's probably more productive to use Ruby/Python/etc... and call Rust externally to optimize hot spots.