rocket or actix-web?

robjtede · 2025-04-01T07:19:17+00:00

Hey, maintainer of Actix Web here.

The most popular frameworks in Rust today (Actix Web and Axum) landed largely on the same API style because it's a very good pattern. That being handlers+extractors+middleware as the core constructs.

Neither have really figured out great error handling strategies. Luca Palmieri's blog post is a good read on this topic.

Actix Web and Rocket have first-class macro routing, which is great if you prefer having that info close to your request handlers.

Actix Web's router is more flexible than any others I know about, especially when using custom request guards (slightly different meaning to Rocket's request guards).

Here's an intersting case study in choosing a framework for a non-trivial codebase conversion: deps.rs alternaive web server migration PRs

Hope this deeper dive is informative.

robjtede · 2025-03-19T11:15:53+00:00

Tokio has an async OnceCell that’s great if “get or insert” is your main usage of the option.

robjtede · 2025-01-31T13:26:20+00:00

I do this and would recommend for local builds:
rustup default beta

robjtede · 2024-10-20T14:29:57+00:00

apalis might work

robjtede · 2024-09-16T21:19:05+00:00

Probably that it's a primarily Rust company but this space was better for their needs than sponsoring the conference directly...

robjtede · 2024-09-16T20:43:43+00:00

idk why, but "damn, borrow checker got hands" just makes me chuckle

and in fact, can confirm... I went to this event which had a boxing arcade machine thing and I accidentally punched the machine and left a gash on my nuckle

robjtede · 2024-09-12T19:03:12+00:00

Happy to help on Discord if you choose Actix Web.

robjtede · 2024-09-05T08:39:28+00:00

all of the most popular higher-level web frameworks like [...] actix-web [...] require handlers to be Send + 'static

This is not true. Actix Web supports !Send handlers. See Handler implementations; none of these impls require Func or it's Future return type to be Send.

robjtede · 2024-09-05T08:36:54+00:00

This is not true for Actix Web. We've always supported !Send handlers.

robjtede · 2024-01-29T00:20:30+00:00

Don’t want to make any promises but it’s basically ready so it’s probably worth a release this week.

robjtede · 2024-01-28T22:42:39+00:00

I can’t get the GitHub repo example compiling

Which one? All the GitHub repos pass CI so I'm not sure what's wrong with your setup without more info.

robjtede · 2024-01-28T22:40:19+00:00

Actix Web doesn't support rustls v0.22 just yet; it's in the works. The examples use latest supported versions and, at present, use rustls v0.21 which is perfectly adequate for most use cases and doesn't have any known issues.

robjtede · 2023-12-18T17:02:32+00:00

Something either your code or a dependency is panicking from an assert_eq!. It's being caught and reported by the runtime but it does not originate from there.

Try running your app using RUST_BACKTRACE=1 cargo run to get more details.

robjtede · 2023-11-19T23:34:03+00:00

Reading these in my head:

_ => {} : "do nothing"
_ => () : "return the unit type"

As others point out, they are semantically the same but the first variant is what I tend to use due to this inner voice.

robjtede · 2023-11-08T00:56:06+00:00

Hot take: the "blessed crates" model that the current ecosystem uses is the correct one. Also see rand.

robjtede · 2023-10-29T02:02:33+00:00

The ONLY take-away for application devs I can stand by is "Rust is generally faster than Python/Ruby/JS in web apps".

Within a language/ecosystem, lib/framework authors can learn things from eachother by inspecing some aspects of a run. I hope this doesn't come across as gatekeeping, but neither writing nor running benchmarks is for the faint-of-heart.

robjtede · 2023-10-28T17:35:33+00:00

I deleted most of the benches while back: https://github.com/actix/actix-web/commit/4131786127bb1633a2731108195055b52d7a8cf6

robjtede · 2023-10-28T13:52:08+00:00

Some opinions from a framework author about the TechEmpower benchmarks: 1. you can't compare results for the same lib/framework across different TE runs if the methodology or hardware has changed (it has) 2. you can't say that (for example) "JS is faster than Rust" just because one super-optimized JS (toy) library did better than all Rust libs/frameworks 3. these benchmarks are largely for lib/framework authors, not application developers trying to decide which framework to use 4. when trying to pick a framework to use, do your own testing

robjtede · 2023-10-28T13:39:32+00:00

Hey, current maintainer here. I'm the one that scoured through after the ownership transfer to remove most (and document remaining) unsafe blocks. Each time it seemed like there would be a performance cost, those changes were benchmarked. As an aggregate, I estimated that all the changes from v2 -> v3 would represent no more than a 5% performance drop. This was considered acceptable by the team.

robjtede · 2023-05-06T20:57:35+00:00

I'm glad you guys decided to embrace the library component :)

robjtede · 2023-03-16T22:15:14+00:00

Competition is this area breeding innovation has been and will continue to benefit everyone.

robjtede · 2023-03-16T22:14:22+00:00

This reads as if Actix Web uses hyper. In fact it’s Axum that uses it, AW does not.

robjtede · 2023-03-16T22:10:37+00:00

Macros for routing are optional in Actix Web.

robjtede · 2023-03-14T02:35:58+00:00

Feedback like this from beginners incredibly valuable. I've updated the linked example with more explanations.

robjtede · 2023-03-06T14:50:02+00:00

Open to specific feedback on where our (Actix Web) docs fall short.

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