Building Web APIs with Rust - State of the Union

Introduction

This repository contains the sample code for Rainer Stropek's talk at Eurorust 2022. They have been updated for Rainer's talk at the BASTA conference in Frankfurt in 2023. The accompanying slides can be found here.

Abstract

Many people primarily see Rust as a platform for doing systems programming. It is great in that area, but you can do so much more with Rust. In this talk, Rainer will focus on how to build web APIs with Rust. Modern web APIs typically run in the cloud and Rust’s ability to produce small and blazingly fast apps is perfectly suited for keeping your cloud bills small.

In his talk, Rainer will do a high-level comparison of the frameworks Actix, Rocket, Warp, and Axum. How does typical API code look like in these frameworks? What are the most fundamental abstractions in them? How active and mature are they? Rainer will prepare a sample and use it to show similarities and differences. In addition to traditional frameworks, Rainer will also speak about Wasm-based options like WAGI and Spin and put them in perspective.

The session will be code-heavy. The audience should have a solid understanding of the Rust programming language. However, people attending this session do not need to be Rust experts with years of practical experience. The general messages of the talk should be understandable for people who want to build web APIs and are in the process of evaluating whether they should invest more time in learning Rust.