[jcpst]

I’ve been using Rust as a hobbyist since 2015. I see what’s going on in the community, attend a meetup, and work on open source projects (mostly my own).

I’m starting a side project, and after much consideration, I went with F# and AspNetCore. The maturity of the framework and solutions for web is hard to ignore.

And then F# gives me a lot of what I like about Rust: union types, pattern matching, avoiding null… With less syntax, and without reasoning about lifetimes, which still takes me more effort than I would like.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Rust. In this case, I was able to build out a web server a lot faster, while still getting _most_ of what I love about Rust.

[runevault]

Are you using ASP.Net Core straight up or through something like Giraffe? Also are you using JS or Fable/etc to handle the front end? The F# web ecosystem is something that I've done light research on but haven't done a real project with yet, but still incredibly curious about it.

[jcpst]

I'm using Giraffe. Building everything in the request pipeline as composable handlers has been nice.

For the front end, I have decided to do server-rendered pages, using Giraffe.ViewEngine. So the source for the HTML is all F# code too.

For interactivity and updates without a full page reload, I am using htmx. This has been so nice that I feel “done” with SPAs as the default choice for a web UI. 99% of the JS I need is encapsulated in a library. If I ever need more, I can just incrementally adopt Vue or something similar on a page that needs it and go from there.

[runevault]

That sounds wonderful. I'll keep your thoughts in mind if I get back to F# for something to try out.