In this post we will not answer the question everybody asks when starting a new project: Should I do it in Rust ?
Instead, we'll explore the pitf...
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Thanks for reading ! This was my first post ever, I'd love to have your feedback !
What should we write about next ?
Or if you have suggestions, don't hesitate to let us know in comments !
Choosing #5!
*#4 please! *
Mid-read I veered off and researched how one would approach this. Thank you for the article!
Hmm… I'd say it's up to you (of course), and I can't really decide…
I guess I would choose 2 or 5.
Awesome article!
I'd vote for 1 & 2
please do number 4 sir
Great article. I've been working to transition teams into Rust in the world of AWS Serverless with Lambda Functions and Containers. The learning curve is real but the productivity and performance is amazing.
Thanks ! Serverless is a great use case for Rust yes, cold start diff can be huge ! What language are they coming from ?
So I work with a lot of different teams. Most come from Go but I've moved teams from TypeScript too.
do you mean productivity once you get over the learning curve? Where does this productivity come from? is it type safe code? easier error handling?
Fewer defects. Better project/library management. Cleaner code paradigms like errors and enums.
The support following this post has been amazing, thanks everyone ❤️
We're now working on our deep dive series ✨
In the meantime if you want to start looking at some webdev projects, we did a tiny "listicle" with a couple of opensource saas/fullstack tools that have been invaluable to us while learning, I hope it can be useful to you as well 🙌
The projects that helped us learn Rust 🦀
On a different theme, we published yesterday: What's coming to Postgres ? 🐘, a dive into the recent innovations in that space.
Cheers !
Great to hear I’m using rust in my backend as well it’s just crazy cause when I started like most Rust was foreign language people were knee deep in react and Ruby so to see rust take off is nuts future definitely bright in Rust
Adoption from larger players and efforts from the community have made it a lot easier to onboard for a variety of use cases, and we're still early 👍
Thanks for this article. Amazingly, you're open-source. I will surely learn from the repo.
I am also learning rust. I built a basic backend with Axum and MongoDB. Unfortunately, I can't share -- client work. It was a bittersweet experience. I enjoyed some things but found other things stressful coming from a TypeScript/Golang and Python background. I am still learning though.
Thanks ! I can relate, until you've truly integrated the concepts lifecycle and ownership can drive you crazy. It'll get easier with practice !
Cool, thanks for sharing it.
4 would be nice!
Wow.
I loved the article.
It's really encouraging and I think it's time I head back and learn rust 😂.
Thanks Vincent :) Join us 🦀 🦀
Why not Scala? Since you were Scala developers what is the reason not to choose Scala?
I'm myself wondering if Scala is a dead end as moving to Scala 3, licensing problems with Akka/Pekko,, reduced community, ABI stability, and so on and I've been wondering if I should move to Rust.
I love coding in Scala, it's type system, hybrid OOP functional paradigm, JVM based and lot of other merits, but it feels like investing more time in it's ecosystem is not worth it.
I would love to hear why you've made the move over to Rust more than just the "drama-heavy and sometimes toxic Scala community". Do you see Scala as a technical dead end too?
Hey Danny,
We had the same feeling as you. Although we really enjoyed the language, we didn't feel like committing to a long-term project based primarily on Scala, even if it meant starting from scratch in a new ecosystem. I wouldn't say that Scala is a dead end, but it has definitely lost its flavor for us, and starting this project was a good opportunity to change and have fun learning something new.
I can't speak for the relational db drivers, but the mongodb rust driver is excellent, and quite mature.
Great article, and it motivates me to start learning Rust (probably in a couple of days 🙄)...
Thanks, first few weeks are hard but hang in there, it gets pretty rewarding afterward :)
I've been exited to start learning rust since a long time, after this article... ITS JUST THE TIME!
ahah happy to hear it 😄
2
Lovely! Will solo build a product in Rust very soon.
Great ! Let us know how it goes :)
Insightful post 👍
Glad you liked it 🙌
This is awesome post
Thanks Jiten ;)
Thanks for sharing your Rust experience. I found it a well-articulated article.
Thanks Sandeep :)
This resonates strongly with our experience building moteDB, an embedded multimodal database for AI agents and robots, also in pure Rust.
Your point about the ecosystem being "still maturing" is spot-on, but I'd frame it differently: Rust's ecosystem is mature where it matters most (core language, async runtime, serialization) and immature where it's expected to be (niche domain-specific libraries). We hit this exact wall when we needed a database that could handle vector embeddings, structured sensor data, and time-series logs in a single embedded engine — nothing existed that was both Rust-native and designed for edge AI workloads.
On lesson #4 ("don't chase perfection") — this cannot be overstated. Our first version had way too much
unsafecode trying to squeeze out every last nanosecond from our B+ tree implementation. We ended up rewriting it with safe Rust, usingArc<RwLock<T>>in places where we initially thought we needed lock-free data structures. The result? Maybe 3-5% slower on microbenchmarks, but we shipped 3 months earlier and haven't had a single memory safety issue in production.The one thing I'd add to your list: Rust's type system is your best testing tool. We model our storage engine's state machine using Rust's enum system, and the compiler catches invalid state transitions that would require dozens of unit tests in other languages. When you're dealing with crash recovery and WAL replay logic, having the compiler enforce that "you cannot transition from CRASHED to RUNNING without first calling RECOVER" is genuinely game-changing.
Also interesting to see you chose gRPC-web + Tonic. We went with a similar stack for our inter-process communication layer (when a robot's perception module needs to query the database). Tonic's codegen from protobuf specs is really clean.
Question for the team: how are you handling database migrations in production? We ended up building a custom schema evolution system since Diesel's migration tooling felt too heavy for embedded deployments. Would love to hear what approach worked for a SaaS-scale product.
Is it really worth it to move from java ecosystem to rust.Considering the effort it needs to migrate and also finding folks in rust is not possible so you need to give some time to devs to warm up. Also its not possible to achieve good productivity due to the lack of tooling.
If you don't feel the need for your use case (or motivation), or if you have short-term productivity requirements, don't move to rust !
However regarding the tooling I must say it has been pretty straightforward (at least it is not something that impacted negatively our productivity)
love the article. the best part of rust is even the learning curve is really something but their documentation, their book even the ruslings is so great. Even better they do really know how to make error messages lol
Thank you for the articles, i'll refer anyone that start to learn rust to read this one <3