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Discussion on: Why there seem to be less opportunities in Rust (right now) ?

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aghost7 profile image
Jonathan Boudreau • Edited

Generally speaking, I don't think there is enough benefit yet for people to switch for web development. I wouldn't limit Rust's use case to just systems programming though. It has a lot of potential in desktop development (e.g., QT development), game development, and embedded.

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gklijs profile image
Gerard Klijs

Indeed, embedded seems to be the use case for some of the companies here in the Netherlands. But it will take at least 5 years till rust will be as viable as Java for web / microservices I think.

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aghost7 profile image
Jonathan Boudreau • Edited

It probably will ever really be used for web development with the exception of very niche, performance-sensitive use cases. This is what npm decided to do for a few of their services. In other words, Rust is already there when it comes to microservices.

Even if the ecosystem gets pretty big, Rust is a low level programming language. It makes it very obvious what is happening to the memory of the program, which is not something you care about most of the time when writing a web service.

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YJDoc2 • Edited

Yes Jonathan Boudreau, even when I think of Rust in Web related works, Most advantages I can see are in type system and catching compile-time errors. There were few incidences where I called redirect on res object instead of req or incorrectly called a method on an object in python, which were only detected when I hit that route while testing. But with Typescript for JS, and introduction of type annotations for python, these advantages in Rust doesn't seem to give much benefits compared to cost.

Thank for sharing your thoughts Gerard Klijs 😄