HACKER Q&A
📣 champagnepapi

Anyone using Rust for server side application development?


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


  👤 smt88 Accepted Answer ✓
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.


👤 the__alchemist
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.


👤 dafelst
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.


👤 ralston3
- 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.


👤 mbalex99
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.

👤 cvwright
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.


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

https://rust-on-nails.com


👤 42e6e8c8-f7b8-4
https://mayhem4api.forallsecure.com is using actix web with diesel for backend.

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