So I've just tinkered around a bit in Rust, and I'm not intimately familiar with the language. My experience has been pretty good, but I don't see how it's a good fit for the web domain. At least not the enterprisey, CRUD, business apps I'm used to building.

I'd be curious to hear from people who have been using Rust for their web backends, though. Beyond the classic selling points of speed and safety, what benefits have you found that apply to web development? Have you had any issues with the ecosystem or finding developers?

Rust shares many of the benefits of Go:

- statically linked binaries for ease of deployment

- good concurrency

- builtin testing framework

But it's a much sharper tool than Go:

- Really great error handling with Result/Option and the ? marker

- Like, really really good error handling, esp compared to Go

- Very pleasant logging and tracing

- Serde is fantastic at automatically serializing/deserializing datastructures

- Generics make Map/Reduce/Filter really easy and readable

- Really good project management through modules/Cargo.toml

- Crates.io is like NPM - really discoverable and easy to upload (with its goods and bads)

- FFI with Swift, C, C++, Node, etc to share code everywhere

- Builtin documentation

- Builtin benchmarking

- Powerful hygienic and non-hygienic macros

There's a lot more. I would say people choose Rust over other web frameworks not because of the language, but the emphasis on great tooling. Being able to test, document, benchmark, deploy, package, with a language that feels like a child between Go, JavaScript, and C++ is very attractive. Plus, it's fast - like really fast - and it's really obvious where optimizations can be made when the time comes.

I've worked a decent amount with Go, but I'm also frustrated with the size of projects balloon. When I compare my Rust and Go code, the Rust code ends up being much smaller (LoC) and much more dense/terse.

I've been working with it for a few years now, and I'm 100% willing to trade some complexity when doing Advanced Stuff (tm) for the 1st-class tooling. I hate having to decide which testing/documentation/building/benchmark/etc framework to use in other languages. I just want to build, not futz around with Jest/Babel/Webpack/Poetry/PyEnv/Opam/CMAKE etc.

If you're looking into using Rust for web, I recommend https://github.com/http-rs/tide - it's the most pleasant web framework I've ever used.