Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
I'm not sure I agree with the article's premises. Rust can be difficult, yes, but it can also heighten developer productivity above other languages. In Go, I'd have to worry about whether I checked for exceptions via `if err != nil` everywhere, while with Rust, I can depend on the compiler telling me if I haven't done so exhaustively, via the Result type. Same for having algebraic data types or, well, generics in general.<p>I will also push back on other commentors here saying Rust is not good for web apps and APIs, and I have found that to be the opposite of true. I read Zero To Production In Rust [0] (a great book by the way, all about creating a web API with actix-web and Postgres) and deployed an API that has not gone down a single time since deploying near the beginning of this year. It's as ergonomic as (and sometimes even more so than) any NodeJS or Go API I've made (as even though Rust doesn't have function overloading, actix-web and others have some macro magic they do behind the scenes to make it appear as if it does), and there were very few times I had to contend with the borrow checker. If there had been and if I were really going for speed, I would also have cloned everywhere that was needed.<p>When I write something in Rust and it compiles, I can depend on it to work, and to continue working. At the end of the day, use the tool that makes sense for your business, but I don't think Rust was necessarily a bad choice based on my personal experience with it.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.zero2prod.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zero2prod.com/</a>