Is anyone able to lay out some of the reasons why you might want to write web applications in rust? I was under the impression rust was designed as a safer language for low level systems programming. Thanks!
I'd say that in all the talk of Rust being a C replacement, what gets lost is that it is also a very expressive, modern, functionally flavored language, perfectly suitable for higher-level programming.
If you want type safety, speed, expressive language & native binaries, Rust is a good choice.
Sure, however you do pay the significant cost of having to satisfy the borrow checker. There are other nice expressive languages where you don't have to do that so if you actually don't need the speed Rust is maybe not the best choice.
You often should think about it in other languages too, ie to avoid concurrency bugs. If you don't, there's a good chance your program isn't correct, even if accepted by a less strict compiler.
Web servers for embedded or otherwise constrained systems, bolt-on embedded api servers for your existing apps, or just any high perf app/gateway. All the reasons you would otherwise do it in cpp except nope.
If you want type safety, speed, expressive language & native binaries, Rust is a good choice.