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Chetan Mittal
Chetan Mittal

Posted on • Originally published at blog.chetanmittaldev.com on

Rust is not good for web development, why?

I have been developing web applications since 2005 in RubyonRails and I think it is the best framework for building web applications ever.

Why?

  • Ruby Language

  • Too opinionated

  • Large community and ecosystem

  • ORM

  • A large number of web products as examples

I had tried building web applications using PHP-based frameworks Zend, and Symfony; Python-based framework Django; Elixir-based framework Phoenix; and Rust-based frameworks Rocket, and Actix.

So far none has been compelling to make me leave Ruby on Rails.

Ok, let's come to the main highlight of the post. Why Rust is not good for web development? This is my observation and might differ for other programmers.

  • I don't like compiling as I am happy seeing my code work or not work live dynamically. Also, I don't care because my dev machine has 32 GB RAM and an 8-core processor so I am not developing web applications in a hardware-constrained development environment.

  • I don't want to bother about manually worrying about data and function types because I have already enough to focus on a web application. Nowadays, each industry or field has a web application already available with intense competition such that each new web application to be launched needs competitive features to sustain. The SaaS industry is too competitive and every day 100s of software products fail.

  • Rust does NOT have a compelling web application development framework that can make me leave my comfort zone I have with Ruby on Rails.

  • Lack of large web development community and ecosystem.

  • Lack of a well-defined ORM. I personally feel a web application has to be developed as a monolith till it reaches a stage where it can be distributed into a few web services to make it more fast and available to users.

What do you say?

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