[jmt_]

I've built all my web backends in either Flask or Django - what are the selling points/advantages of using Rust vs. Python in this context? Certainly not arguing against it but am very curious and unfamiliar with Rust. If anyone has moved from Python to Rust for this kind of work, can you speak on your experiences with doing so?

[drogus]

I have a very limited experience with Python (3 months of production experience), but vast Ruby experience and I think a lot of the things apply to both. For me these are reasons why I would choose Rust over Python or Ruby in most cases:

* it's relatively easy to write code that will pretty much never crash. yes, Rust will not prevent all of the bugs, but it will prevent almost all of the things that end up as a runtime exception in dynamic languages. So ou will not end up with an error tracker full of errors

* refactoring is so much easier in Rust - I can enter a new project, change a bunch of stuff and after I fix compile errors and tests my confidence that I didn't break anything is like 10 times higher than in Ruby or Python

* while most of the time speed is not a major concern for backend development, it sometimes is a huge bonus. There were cases in the past when I had to spend a lot of time to optimise Ruby code, because it was just too slow (imagine rendering a lot of HTML, doing computation that is hard to do on the DB side etc)

* handling JSON with serde is just on another level

* Rust is very versatile. When a company starts using a language, they will naturally try to fit as much stuff into the language as possible, after all if you have mostly Python devs, you will prefer Python. A lot of people say "just use the right tool for the job", but even if there was something like "the right tool for the job", in practice it's more like: if the downsides of using our primary tech are huge, let's consider introducing a new language, otherwise let's stick with what we have. I've seen it numerous times in the past. I feel like with Rust the downsides of using it for most of the stuff are much smaller than for example for most of the other languages

[fiedzia]

Modern web will be Python + Django/Flask + Js/Typescript (and maybe Swift or Java for mobile apps). You can replace almost all of that with Rust, so you'll get one language to rule them all, but focusing on Python part only: obviously performance, sane tooling and dependency management, statically typed language results in less runtime errors. Overall Python gets you a lot faster from 0 to "it works on my laptop", Rust gets you faster to 'it's good enough to put it in production".

[theptip]

If you really need speed (high RPS) then Python is going to tap out at some point. Normally for line-of-business apps and most startups, developer productivity trumps raw perf IMO (obviously depends on the domain though).

There is some argument that you (or at least some developers) can be more productive with a strongly-typed ORM, but I think FastAPI / Django-ninja capture most of these benefits in the Python ecosystem so it’s not a big win in this dimension IMO.

But in summary it’s a perf vs productivity trade-off.

[dehrmann]

It's written in Rust. Rust is at the state of its life where people will try to do anything and everything with it because they can. Some will stick, while some is just silly.

If I interviewed somewhere that used Rust for web apis, I'd be very hesitant because this isn't really what Rust is good at (yet?), and someone chose it because they wanted to try it more than use the right tool for the job.