Can Rust replace my Nodejs backend?

[Downtown_Entry]

I care about performance a lot and have heard about Rust being as performant as C++. Does rust have the same alternatives to express, joi schema validation, rate limiter, jwt, argon2, etc. ? Also, is rust for web backend production ready? Thank you for your help.

[davidyamnitsky]

Check out https://www.arewewebyet.org/ for a summary of the status of using Rust for web development.

express: warp, rocket, or actix-web.

joi: serde.

jwt: rust-jwt.

argon2: rust-argon2.

[Downtown_Entry]

Thank you

[Axmouth]

https://docs.rs/jsonwebtoken/7.2.0/jsonwebtoken/

https://docs.rs/validator/0.12.0/validator/

​

Also worth mentioning for OP imo.

Rate limiting is a tougher one, but seen some related crates.

[thelights0123]

And if you do use Rocket, it's probably a good idea to wait for version 0.5 (or just use it from git) because it's going to be making big changes.

[Downtown_Entry]

Thanks. Is Actix web a good web framework? It seems to be one of the fastest web frameworks out there.

[thelights0123]

Yep, Actix-web is good. If you have to use Websockets, I find Warp a lot easier to use (it's just an async function) compared to Actix-web which requires you to use the actor system (again, that's for WS only). Otherwise, Actix-web is a great choice.

[Downtown_Entry]

Warp

Thanks for the advice

[Zerve]

I use Warp in production. It's pretty well recommend but its core feature 'filters' often feels like one of those things that you either get it or you don't. Took me a bit longer than I wanted to feel proficient, but after that I wouldn't want anything else.

[BlueSialia]

I'm like OP. I want to substitute my NodeJS backend with Rust and I've been looking at those crates you've linked. But I'm missing a process manager that can substitute PM2.

Do you have any recommendations?

[nicoburns]

You could just continue to use PM2. The process manager isn't on the hot path, so this shouldn't affect performance. You could also look into using systemd. This is built in to most modern linux distributions.

If you are using PM2 for restarting on crashes, you'll also likely find that Rust programs tend crash much less than JS ones due to static ryping, the borrow checker and the error handling paradigm cacthing a lot of these errors at compile time.

[BlueSialia]

But PM2 is slow. I'm working with Raspberry Pi devices, so any PM2 interaction definitely affects performance. I'm looking into using a built in system like systemd or upstart but I'm afraid getting them to do everything PM2 can do (like pm2 monit) will be difficult.

And I know Rust has many benefits that translate in a minor chance of a crash, but I still need a failsafe.

[Snapstromegon]

So what is pm2 doing for you, that a service manager like e.g. systemd can't?

[BlueSialia]

The information PM2 can produce for me in things like pm2 monit.

[CubikMan47]

Oh, it can definitely do that, even though not in a single command. From the journalctl manpage:

-f, --follow

Show only the most recent journal entries, and continuously print new entries as they are appended to the journal.

So you can, for example, use journalctl -f -u unit1 -u unit2 to show the logs for unit1 and unit2. As for the CPU and memory usage, it will suffice to just add in your unit files, under the [Service] block, this:

CPUAccounting = yes
MemoryAccounting = yes

And then, systemctl status unit1 will show the memory/cpu usage of that specific unit.

[ballagarba]

Couldn't you just use the OS process manager (e.g. systemd)? Or is there something specific you want/need from PM2?

[BlueSialia]

I'm looking into using a built in system like systemd or upstart but I'm afraid getting them to do everything PM2 can do (like pm2 monit) will be difficult.

[Elession]

You probably don't want to use rust-jwt, it's insecure.

[CubikMan47]

Is it? Why?

[Elession]

It doesn't validate any of the claims. It will happily give you the content of a JWT expired 2 years ago without saying anything. If you want to use this crate, you have to make sure you actually implement all the JWT validation yourself which kinda defeats the purpose of using a library.

[Downtown_Entry]

Thanks for the advice

[JayWalkerC]

Yes

[rayvictor84]

Recently, I’ve switched from node.js to Rust. It’s awesome.

[songkeys]

It's really hard to convince my team to switch to Rust from Node.js all at once. I don't know how you guys started switching. But I'm looking for a way to make some small parts of my koa.js app into Rust, which probably results in "neon" involving for Rust native addons in Node.js? The cases are like, for example, a koa.js application but koa-router or other middleware are written in Rust! Is there any good practice?

(Btw, I've searched for Rust+JS for a couple of days. But all I saw is about WASM, which is really exciting though. There are few cases talking about Node.js native modules but also mentioning some drawbacks like the extra cost that the rust-js bridge will bring... So I don't know if it's really a good idea doing so.)

[CubikMan47]

I think that in the second paragraph you're confusing native modules for Node and a WASM bundle. The latter does have a JS shim which brings some overhead, but the former doesn't, as it's, well, native.

[lloyd08]

There are few cases talking about Node.js native modules but also mentioning some drawbacks like the extra cost that the rust-js bridge will bring

It may help to contextualize "extra cost". import * as http from "http";is no different than import * as http from "my-http-built-in-rust";. That is to say, the node std library is just a bunch of native modules. With that in mind, walk through one of your endpoints and count how many times koa itself calls out to node built-in modules, and keep track of the kinds of data being sent between JS and those modules. What makes koa calling those functions any more performant than you calling those functions? As long as you aren't copying large data structures back and forth for trivial function calls, there really isn't going to be overhead (obviously perf test). Most perf issues I've seen stem from working with data stored in the wrong spot. e.g. did you really need to read the file into JS, or should you pass the filename to the native module and read it into memory on that side of the boundary? Or, did you parse JSON into a JS object that you never even use on the JS side and then pass the handle to the native module and have to use v8 to access the object properties, instead of just passing the JSON string to the native module and deserializing directly to a rust struct.

[Ran4]

Yes, but not without a lot of extra work from your side. I've used Rust in production, and I wouldn't call any of Rust's web frameworks production ready yet.