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Is it worth it using Rust+Axum for backend instead of Node.js? In which situations would you do so?
(lemmy.opensupply.space)
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Rust Programming
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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).
I did this. Further reasons are: correctness and performance.
Rust is much faster while at the same time using a fraction of the resources the equivalent Spring Boot implementation would use. The type safety and being freed from runtime errors is awesome as well. Yes initial development takes longer, but I believe it is worth it. Most projects spend maybe 2% on initial development, 98% is bugfixing, troubleshooting, refactoring. I am confident Rust cuts down on bugfixing by 2/3, which means doubling the initial dev time is well worth it. And it doesn't even take twice as long.
For very simple backends, it's very unlikely you'll get any significant number of bugs with an experienced team, and if performance isn't really a concern, then Rust being faster isn't really relevant. For anything more complex than a simple backend, I'd agree that Rust becomes a lot more appealing, but if you just need to throw together something that handles user profiles or something in a very simple manner, it really doesn't make a difference what language you do it in as long as you write a few tests to make sure everything works.
Agreed!