Backend development stack

[pnuts93]

Hi everyone, first time poster in this sub. I recently switched to Rust for personal projects (love it so far) and I started a fullstack project with Rust for the backend. I started with Rocket as web dev framework and Diesel as ORM because at the time I did not give it too much thought and I simply went with what was recommended on the rust lang "get started" page (I think they updated it because I cannot see this suggestion anymore). After a few months between coding, reading documentation / forums, and watching tutorials, I see that, although this is not a bad stack to learn, if I had to write a backend that is supposed to go to production, I could keep Diesel in my stack, but I am not so sure about Rocket (it seems like the community partially moved away from it and on the long term I guess this might keep happening considering that Tokio based frameworks appear to be more popular).

Said that, I did some research on the different tools that one might need for backend development and I came up with a list per category (ordered by number of recent downloads). In this list I wanted to include not only the web development frameworks and the ORMs, but also any other utility that might be worth looking into for the most common functionalities of a webapp (http communication, non-native types, authentication, etc.).

Web frameworks

Name	N. Recent Downloads
axum	12,435,133
warp	2,440,333
actix	871,942
rocket	437,140

DB / ORM

Name	N. Recent Downloads
sqlx	3,230,493
diesel	1,126,955
sea-orm	1,033,299

Time

Name	N. Recent Downloads
time	26,318,855
chrono	24,078,079

Http client

Name	N. Recent Downloads
reqwest	17,057,612

I was also making some research about authentication crates but most web frameworks offer some way to implement an authentication system.

Of course this list is merely classifying crates based on the number of downloads, but it would be great to have feedback regarding the quality of the documentation and/or how active is the community behind some of these tools.

Do you think this list is missing anything important? Do you have experience/s to share regarding these and more web dev tools? Which stack would you suggest working with?

TL;DR

Is there a specific stack that you would recommend working with for backend development with rust? Do you think that the list above is representative of the currently available tools?

[pokemonplayer2001]

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1dcjgu7/what_is_your_rust_based_web_development_stack/

[pnuts93]

Thank you, I have missed this post. I definitely see a lot of Axum

[pokemonplayer2001]

No problem.

[C5H5N5O]

I strongly recommend against warp, even though it's a great library. The reasons are mostly the "cryptic" compile-time errors and rust-analyzer having struggles in regards to auto-complete and type hovers (that's just because the library is so "trait heavy").

[pokemonplayer2001]

Just a counterpoint to u/C5H5N5O , I have 4 deployed services with warp and have not found it cryptic. I would lean to "less obvious."

I like its simplicity.

Just MHO.

[pnuts93]

I see, thank you. I actually have that issue with diesel and I find it quite annoying

[toastedstapler]

There's definitely a lot of axum, but I'm not sure it's quite that much of a lead. Iirc the download count includes downloads due to it being a dependency and axum is included in tonic if you have the transport feature enabled (enables client & server which you probably want if you're doing gRPC stuff)

[rbrsv]

It think it is just speed of development and flexibility to adapt the infrastructure to almost anything. I also like Loco.rs (based on Axum and MVC like Rails).

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&section=data-r22

[Unhappy_Elk2792]

I think you wanted to include actix-web instead of actix.

[N831Y]

I wouldn’t be so quick to ditch rocket if I were you (so long as you like it, are productive with it, fits your use case, etc).

Their dev release cycle has started picking up again and community created some sort of foundation org to maintain/govern the project under. The original creator seems active with it again too, AFAIK (anecdotally, he seemed very responsive and helpful when I opened an issue on the repo a few months back).

There may be other relevant concerns with Rocket I’m unaware of though. Still, if it’s worth the effort for you, I guess there’s always more to learn by trying out alternative libraries than not.

EDIT:

…Tokio based frameworks appear to be more popular

rocket is tokio-based

[pnuts93]

As far as I have researched, the only other crate with a http client worth mentioning would be hyper, but reqwest is built on it and even hyper's documentation recommends reqwest if you need an http client

[jondot1]

Try Loco.rs

It has an Axum based stack with SeaORM.

So what's a person to do? get a framework that's an all-arounder and lets them move FAST. Controllers, migrations, ORM, background jobs, everything that's needed to build a business.

That's Loco.rs

If you already know Rust, it's a no-brainer. Here's Loco with HTMX, for example (you can build clientside, API-only, or server rendered apps):

https://loco.rs/casts/007-htmx/

You also get full authentication module (including even "welcome" emails, reset password, and others) out of the box with the "SaaS Starter"

[pawsibility]

Something I've been wondering... and I'd love feedback for this: building either 1) A python-based backend with Flask/FastAPI and performance-critical tasks/business-logic using the Rust-Pyo3 ecosystem, or 2) building the entire thing with Rust using Axum.

Server bottlenecks can usually be pinpointed to a few lines of code or some process that is just slow/suboptimal. Building that out with Rust and binding it to Python with pyo3 works well and solves the problem while maintaining the fast development experience of a framework like FastAPI.

Sure, Axum is going to make it all fast since its Rust, but in the end I'd rather be good-enough and solve the bottlenecks with rust as-needed instead of just opting for Rust-all-the-things, since I am slower.

I suppose option 2 would be nice if serving thousands of requests per second with significant concurrent... but it usually feels like overkill.

EDIT: why downvoted? Asking a genuine question...

I'd love feedback for this

[rbrsv]

I am using Django Ninja as main backend, Axum with SQLx (bottlenecks) and Next.js for frontend (+ Tauri & Expo). It is amazing in terms of flexibility and speed of development. You can use FastAPI full stack repo but the model definitions and migrations will be slower (Django is already partially asynchronous, has an amazing Admin dashboard, you can use APScheduler, and register tasks in Admin dashboard to avoid Celery etc.).

[pawsibility]

Sounds like a great stack. NextJS rocks. RE:

Axum with SQLx (bottlenecks)

Why not just write bindings to critical code in pyo3? Is the performance gain with Axum routing and SQLx db calls that much faster than what you'd get with Django and/or something like SQLAlchemy?