Writing websites in Rust

Posted on Edited on

You'll certainly end up with a fast, safe, and easy-to-deploy service, but is it worth the tradeoffs?

WARNING: this is a bit of a rant and not likely helpful.

Not for me.

I've been playing around with the new axum library, which builds on top of tokio and hyper and accepts middleware from tower among others. Sounds like a good time. Their documentation seems well constructed, the tokio Discord server is active and helpful, and they have a good collection of examples.

The service I wanted to create is very simple - a pastebin-style website. I'd use templates for the HTML, and an auth-less no-edit paste system with a "delete after" date. There are only 4 endpoints:

  • index page
  • view paste page
  • new paste page
  • new paste POST page

This is not hard, and not complicated.

I'm using sqlx to handle the storage in SQLite. Again, simple. askama handles the templates in a not-so-simple way, but it's not too complicated to connect with axum with the examples provided (though I had to basically write a custom implementation of the bridge function, as the code in the example didn't work for me). uuid is a simple way to create UUID v4s, though I had to play around with the feature flags to get what I wanted.

The list of dependencies I'm using can be seen here, though keep in mind I haven't slimmed them down at the time of writing. If I cannot slim them down, then there's a lot.

Now, the time penalty you pay for adding dependencies is only noticeable on the first compiles (via cargo b, cargo clippy, and by VSCode). It's not bad. What does annoy me is the penalty I am paying for each compile: 5 to 10 seconds. Each. Change.

Now sure, there's a lot going on behind the scenes for this, and I get a fast, safe, single binary deployable. Right now, I have some programs that are writing in Elixir and deployed via podman images rsync'd directly to a VPS - neither release-style building time nor size are an issue right now. It's the developer UX that is rough. If I make a change to a template, that's a recompile. If I make a change to a route, that's a recompile. If I add a log statement, that's a recompile. Does that make sense? Yes. Is it nice? No. The size of that directory right now is 1.3GB. Yes, GB. The directory size of a Discord bot I run is 118MB.

Is Rust a good language? Yes, absolutely! I really like many of the things that the Rust language, ecosystem, team, and community do, and I absolutely plan to continue to use Rust in many different ways. But for web servers? Nah, I'm happy with Python.