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Discussion on: That About Wraps It Up For Actix-Web

 
ghost profile image
Ghost • Edited

but we'll have to see what happen with Actix, maybe someone else will take charge, but the fact is, if disappears I can't sit in my thumbs for who knows how long and sadly technically better doesn't make it viable (ask Haskell programmers).

My main interests in programming in general are embedded and webdev (mainly backend), to catch C in embedded Rust is years away and without Actix webdev seems to be also in the same situation.

But maybe all get sorted and this is a wake up call for the Actix founder to get more hands in the cooking, maybe get someone to deal with the community and him just code, which probably would make him happier (would make me happier).

Is hard to just leave your work of many years, I'm hoping his fingers get itchy. He released version 2 not long a go for Pete sake. Maybe some cold headed chillout put things in order and the blackout shuts the annoying haters and all of us start taking care of them in forums and github discussions.

Maybe this is just a necessary reset. Dramatic and terrifying but necessary.

Would be bad either if Mozilla or some other big dog pay some attention to Actix, because as I mentioned, the whole web backend is nowadays depending in 1 guy and is not a cold hard tuff almost inhuman Torvalds, that scolds Intel for their bugs or give the finger to Nvidia.

Meanwhile, it forced me to make some rework in a petproject tha have some coupled code, some layers mixed up that would make dificult to migrate from Actix to something else. :)

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

I've dabbled with Rust for a short while because I got involved in a project which used it on the backend - which later stalled, then failed, in large part because of the same sort of psychological/interpersonal issues which we're discussing here - headstrong, 'toxic' en self-centered people, prima donnas. I really had a deja vu feeling, different context, similar problems.

We used Rocket as that was apparently the 'standard' choice, I have no clue if it was good or bad but as far as I could see it worked.

I was (am) a total beginner in Rust but I liked the design and philosophy of the language a lot. It has a very well designed type system, it has a strong FP feel to it, and so on. Haskell but then less academic and more practical, that's how I see it. I don't see it as a better C since I'm not interested in C (or C++) at all :-)

After that I looked at Go and I was quite shocked at how incredibly simplistic the language is. What really sticks out like a sore thumb is the lack of generics in its type system, this means that any form of FP (functional programming) is almost impossible, as a result everything is coded imperatively with repetitive loops ad nauseam.

The good thing is of course its compiler which runs circles around Rust's (but then again the Go compiler doesn't do that much ...) but if Go didn't have its admittedly brilliant Goroutines then I wonder if people would care about it at all.

Sad to say that after that project which I mentioned went south there wasn't much motivation left for me to spend any more time on Rust.

Also a pity IMO if Rust gets framed too much as a "systems programming" language in the C/C++ corner, potentially it could be a very good web/network/backend development programming language as far as I could see.

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ghost profile image
Ghost

exactly, that's why I think that Actix is so important, it's the proof that you can make higher level stuff with it; I haven't lost hope on a Actix comeback, if not by Nikolay by someone else. Is too much and to good work to be lost and the Rust ecosystem is small enough that this event will not pass unnoticed. I wouldn't take Actix for dead yet. Imagine how awesome and how fast could Actix grow with a "big" dog behind it, it hasn't even need to be that big, maybe even take Nikolay as head dev and put people to deal with community, minor patches, etc. In a Linus like situation. If him almost alone built Actix in a few years. We sometimes think webdev as just more complex websites, but is also tooling for monitoring, interfaces for embedded, enterprise systems, ERP are basically huge webapps. And with Rust as one of the main wasm PL having a fast and robust backend is vital and now we know it can be done and used even by chumps like me :) and even without a huge documentation like Django, the fact that I can use it just with the API docs is a credit to buth, Rust and Actix.

I'll take a second look to Rocket but the fact that is a 0.5x version and that only works with nightly kills me.