In practical perspectives, I’m mostly concerned about computer resources usage; I have computer resources constraints. So using Rust would benefit on that. But it is for a Web application backend. So, is it worth it having to learn Rust + Tokio + Axum, … in this specific situation? Also, that this is mostly for initially prototyping an application. Also considering if I add developers in the future, they would most likely not be familiar with Rust, but with more popular frameworks such as Node.
Learning Rust is probably always worth it. It’s more efficient, lasts longer and is safer, I would try it
Consider the constraints and select technology accordingly. You mention being concerned about compute resources, try to elaborate on that.
Are you doing it for ideological purposes? Is your hardware exceptionally constrained? Economical limitations? You will necessarily spend a lot more time compiling when using Rust, so that might eat up any compute savings if the scale of the project is small enough.
If time is a concern at all, then learning a different stack is almost always going to be a losing proposition. Rust is also not the most prototyping-friendly language in my experience - hacking together stuff in Python is almost always going to be faster - but it’s by no means impossible.
If for educational purposes, then I recommend Rust, as it is fun and teaches you new ways of thinking about your code.
Finally, the fact that few people know Rust is a real underrated disadvantage you definitely want to consider.
Best of luck with your endeavor.
I mean, what kind of resource constraints are we talking about? If it’s low-powered hardware that can’t run Node.js, then it’s obviously going to be worth it…
For prototyping, if you don’t already know Rust, it’s probably not worth it.
When you really know Rust it’s IMO easier to write a web server in Rust than node, but there is a long road to getting to that level.
I think if you know Rust then I think Rust + async is going to perform better and consume less resources than NodeJS by a LOT. It should also work more reliably on embedded devices, or even docker containers because memory isn’t going up and down like a yoyo because of GC.
That said NodeJS is more immediate and might lend itself to better prototyping / RAD and you might not care enough about performance to justify using a compiled language. A lot of web servers aren’t doing enough that you would even notice a difference in performance.
Another reason for Rust might also be because it’s more energy efficient. I wish Amazon and other cloud services would put a heavier cost penalty on efficiency. I wonder how many cloud web apps are running bloated stacks to serve up content which could be done with a fraction of the energy.
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This highly depends on what it is you’re trying to build. If it’s a simple CRUD backend + database, then there’s really no reason to use Rust except if you just want to. If it’s doing heavy computation, then you’d want to benchmark both and see if any potential gains by writing it in Rust are worth the effort of using Rust over Node.js.
Practically speaking, it’s really uncommon to need to write a backend in Rust over something like JS or Python. Usually that’s only needed for high throughput services (like Cloudflare’s proxy service which handles trillions of daily requests), or ones performing computationally expensive work they can’t offload to another service (after benchmarking first of course).
