Cool!
It's been my personal belief that Rust should have something like this! the "gateway drug" 
towards using safe native software so to speak 
The stringly-typing genuinely puzzles me though:
Why on earth would you make port stringly typed? 
If anything is a uint16, this is!
It even adds two "-quotes worth of extra typing vs let host = 7878... Or what am I missing?
I'm still on the fence about the host IP, on the one hand there's std::net::IpAddr, on the other hand it would add quite some boilerplate:
IpAddr::V4(Ipv4Addr::new(127, 0, 0, 1)); // verbose, guaranteed to work...
"127.0.0.1".parse().expect("couldn't parse IP address") // not much better...
Want me to open discussion github-issues for this, or rather discussion-here/coding-on-github?