[ahungry]

I've noticed that Rust is in an interesting spot - it has a lot of overlapping appeal with various groups.

- C/C++ developers like it as an alternative for low level languages

- Functional programmers like it because of it's functional features

- "Cargo Culters" / "Hot Language" / "Flavor of the Month" followers like it, as it's in vogue at the moment (this is the crowd that has likely shifted from various web/API scripting languages over the last decade - (php|ruby|python) -> nodejs -> rust)

However, as the article alludes to, for the third crowd, Rust is just likely not a great fit (even if it has a lot of neat features and introduces some great concepts others may not stumble on of their own accord) when your implementation doesn't do much beyond web dev/API/scripting purposes.

[drogus]

I've written a few APIs in Rust and I'm kinda baffled on what the author is trying to convey. On the one hand he mentions that it's a simple CRUD application, on the other hand he mentions complexity that arose from using Rust. I wish he gave some concrete examples of problems that they have. From my experience, when writing web APIs, most of the problems with Rust are not really that visible. Most of the time you get a request, process some data or interact with a database (or both) and return the response. In this scenario you don't often have to deal with lifetimes or any of the advanced stuff.

[Casperin]

I'm in a fourth category. I just want a simple imperative language with a solid type system that is reasonably fast.

While Rust isn't simple, I don't know any other languages that fill this space.