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by adamrezich
605 days ago
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Disclaimer: I haven't ever written any serious Rust code, and the last time I even tried to use the language was years ago now. What is it about Rust that makes it so appealing to people to use for web backend development? From what I can tell, one of the selling points of Rust is its borrow checker/lifetime management system. But if you're making a web backend, then you really only need to care about two lifetimes: the lifetime of the program, and the lifetime of a given request/response. If you want to write a web backend in C, then it's not too difficult to set up a simple system that makes a temporary memory arena for each request/response, and, once the response is sent, marks this memory for reuse (and probably zeroes it, for maximum security), instead of freeing it. Again, I don't really have any experience with Rust whatsoever, but how does the borrow checker/lifetime system help you with this? It seems to me (as a naïve, outside observer) that these language features would get in the way more than they would help. |
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> Again, I don't really have any experience with Rust whatsoever, but how does the borrow checker/lifetime system help you with this? It seems to me (as a naïve, outside observer) that these language features would get in the way more than they would help.
You're absolutely right that the borrow checker would get in the way. But it's mostly irrelevant in Rust web development. Backend request flow code almost never shares references or changes ownership, so you don't need to think about ownership much in Rust webdev. And since most of the time Rust can infer the lifetimes of variables, you can almost entirely ignore the system and not even annotate lifetimes in your types.
So what you are left with is a language with an incredible type system, extremely modern semantics and ergonomics, zero cost functional abstractions that have no overhead, trait-based OO instead of classes, sum types (Rust enums) and fantastic syntax around matching [1], option and result types (themselves sum types) with fantastic ergonomics, syntax and error handling designed to result in fewer defects in your code, incredible package manager, incredible build system, single binary build targets, the best compiler error messages and lints in the world currently, cross compilation for a wide variety of systems, bare metal performance with no garbage collection.
It's a phenomenal language and offers so much.
And it's insane that you get bare metal / C performance in web code without even having to think about it.
Rust never set out to be a backend web development language, but because the borrow checker disappears when doing web development, you get so many free things from the language that you don't have to pay for. This post [2] explains it pretty well.
[1] One of the best things about the language
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41973845