Thoughts on Rust Web-Development

This entry will be a little scattershot, just some miscellaneous thoughts and impressions.

Interacting with APIs

It’s a little inconvenient to be making a lot of little structs for each feature of an API; where in JavaScript or Python you would have a dictionary, if you want type safety you need to make a struct with the proper fields. Strictly speaking you don’t need to; operating on untyped JSON is actually fairly straightforward, but when you know that the rest of your codebase isn’t going to crash the parts that aren’t guarenteed by the compiler niggle in your brain. The serde-rs library is everything I want in a JSON serialization library. There’s not much in particular to call out, which is good in an infrastructure library; although I can say it’s … much more ergonomic than the serialization I wrote for Hairy Little Buggers.

I wrote about half a dozen little programs to scrape data from YouTube and Twitch as part of secret project, as well as the main app; I would probably do one-off scraping type scripts in Python in future, with app code written in Rust.

Type Safety!

Rust’s type safety gives is extremely hard to give up; working with Python I constantly have to think harder about the inputs and outputs of my functions, becase the source and compiler isn’t doing it for me.

«Rust Web-Development, Part 1 Summer Lightning»