The State of Rust Web Frameworks
- 1. ARE WE WEB YET? THE STATE OF RUST WEB FRAMEWORKS
- 2. BACKGROUND THREE DOMAINS Microservices: tiny single-purpose services; often linked via HTTP APIs: backends that typically interact with a database and handle a wide range of requests Web applications: more complex applications that typically utilize things like cookies, input forms, and a templating engine
- 3. BACKGROUND CHALLENGES Way too many framework choices Database libraries still dont support async that well Few blog posts etc. talking about real production usage Lack of adoption means that best practices havent really emerged in many areas (DB connection pooling, for example)
- 4. BACKGROUND FRAMEWORK SHORTLIST Raw hyper Rocket Warp Tower-web Actix-web
- 5. BACKGROUND FRAMEWORK EVALUATION CRITERIA State of maintenance Ease of use Performance Feature set
- 6. RAW HYPER: THE GOOD The foundation of all other good frameworks Well-maintained Blazing fast Futures-based
- 7. RAW HYPER: THE BAD Not really a framework so expect to write lots of boilerplate Learning curve Futures-based
- 8. ROCKET: THE GOOD Nice website Fantastic documentation (best in class by a wide margin) Actively maintained Almost as easy as using a modern Python framework Resulting code was extremely concise
- 9. ROCKET: THE BAD Seems to be largely controlled by a single maintainer who dictates the release cycle Built on outdated dependencies (most notably hyper) Performance was anything but rocket-like. Terrible stability under heavy load; save yourself the headache and just use Python
- 10. WARP: THE GOOD Its fast Its small
- 11. WARP: THE BAD It was basically designed to explore a single concept: everything is a 鍖lter It has a fairly steep learning curve
- 12. TOWER-WEB: THE GOOD Supports macro-based route de鍖nitions like Rocket Reasonable handling of shared app state Support for handlebars templating built-in
- 13. TOWER-WEB: THE BAD Lacks many basic features like query string binding during the request 鍖ow Parsing capabilities it does have are terribly handicapped (example: not supporting 鍖oating point values) Requires some weird macro wrapping stuff around your application struct
- 14. ACTIX-WEB: THE GOOD Good documentation Still async, but allows you to bring in sync code easily Probably as close to raw hyper performance as any framework will come soon Very close to a 1.0 release 3-8x faster than carefully written Python for non-trivial tasks
- 15. ACTIX-WEB: THE BAD Much more verbose than Id like Taking a paradigm designed for one language and porting it to another seems odd to me, but they did a great job Databases seem to be somewhat an afterthought, and the examples dont really show the proper way to do things
- 16. CONCLUSIONS Most frameworks are pretty immature and dont seem to see serious production use Not enough attention is paid to developer ergonomics Rust is a viable choice for APIs and microservices where high performance is critical, but be prepared to put in a lot of upfront work for a larger web app Futures/async will probably be the thing that trips you up the most, but actix makes things tolerable
- 17. CONCLUSIONS Async database drivers are still immature Even among the frameworks I disliked, most niceties like input parsing are so fast theyre basically free If you want high performance, Rust can more than deliver
- 18. OBLIGATORY REQ/SEC BENCHMARK (AVG. OF 3 RUNS ON MY MACBOOK) 1 10 100 1K 10K 100K HELLO POSTGIS 2.18K 79.12K 2.31K 62.8K 2.2K 56.27K 1.21K 10.18K 542549 rocket aiohttp tower warp actix $ cargo run --release $ wrk -t20 -c500 -d30s