Rust for web development and social media

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I'm starting to learn Rust and I have a question. Is Rust good for web development like a back-end to social media? Better than Javascript? Or is it better in other areas? Thanks!

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Rust is much faster in frontend and backend because Rust brings low-level and high-level together without performance or security losses. However, many people don't want to migrate to Rust for some reasons:

  1. Rust focuses on development ease first of all, not learning ease (it has really great docs and community tho);
  2. Unknown before things scare people;
  3. They're decepted by foes of new technologies.

I'm here not to complain about evil people or to extoll Rust, no. I just wanted you not to be afraid of Rust, to join our community and see why is Rust the most loved language yourself.

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I start from the point of view that pretty much all programming languages we have are the same. Being "Turing Complete" as the guys into such theory say.

But of course programming languages are the interface between what humans can easily understand and what the machines can actually do.

From that simple thought I conclude that a programming language should take us from the fuzzy, error prone thoughts of humans to actual code a machine can run with some hope of it being correct.

As such, I think it is some kind of professional negligence to not use a programming language that catches the most errors a human can make as possible. Sorry if that sounds a bit extreme.

All that aside, I wonder why you think "web development" or "social media" are some special case? They are all just programming after all.

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Rust can be useful for website back-ends. Its advantage is where you need high performance (e.g. lots of data to parse and process), and control over memory usage. Rust is also useful if you're working with big and complex codebases and teams of programmers — that's when a strong type system, mandatory error handling, and a few other code-quality features become most useful.

However, if your site is mostly pulling data from a database and passing it on to a client, then you may not get much benefit from using Rust. JavaScript has a larger web-oriented ecosystem, and much lower learning curve. TypeScript can bring you some of the static typing benefits without switching away from JS.

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Sometimes building something in Go, Nodejs, is more accessible than creating it in Rust. "Does social media need extreme speed or can we build it using one easier language?"

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Thank you very much for your answer, it helps me a lot!

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Rust for web development is great and cool, there are production ready crate like actix, rocket, warp and tide. Tokio or async-std as runtime. Learning rust web framework could be demanding and you may need to implement some processes yourself. If performance is what you are after, rust is great but for fast prototyping empress js or flask is great.

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