March 25, 2023

top rust frameworks

I researched various sources, including blog posts, articles, and community-driven rankings, to gather information on the top Rust frameworks. The consensus among these sources is that there are a few popular and widely-used frameworks in the Rust ecosystem, such as Actix-web, Rocket, Tide, and Warp. Some sources also mentioned other Rust frameworks like GGEZ, Tauri, and Yew, but these were not as frequently discussed as the first four. The sources I found were mostly up-to-date, providing valuable insights into the current state of Rust frameworks. However, there might still be some uncertainty due to the constantly evolving nature of the Rust ecosystem.

Have an opinion? Send us proposed edits/additions and we may incorporate them into this article with credit.

Words

454

Time

7m 42s

Contributors

695

Words read

61.6k

Actix-web

Actix-web

Actix-web is a powerful, pragmatic, and extremely fast web framework for Rust. It is the most popular Rust web framework, with the largest community and ecosystem. Actix-web is a slim web framework that offers an HTTP web server, routing logic, middleware infrastructure, and basic building blocks and abstractions to parse, manipulate, and respond to HTTP requests. It supports async/await and uses Tokio as its futures runtime. Actix-web is often compared to Flask from Python or Express from JavaScript.
Rocket

Rocket

Rocket is another popular Rust web framework, known for its ease of use and being batteries-included. It provides a clean API and integrates tightly with the Rust ecosystem. Rocket is a full-stack web framework and supports features like JSON out of the box, built-in templating support, unit testing library, and a configuration system. However, it is important to note that Rocket is still synchronous and uses nightly versions of Rust.
Tide

Tide

Tide is a clean and easy-to-use Rust web framework that provides support for asynchronous/await programming, type-safe routing, request guards, templating support, session management, and websockets support. It is built on top of the async-std runtime and supports async-await out of the box, which improves performance. Tide is often compared to Flask from Python or Express from JavaScript.

Other Frameworks

Some sources mentioned other Rust frameworks like GGEZ, Tauri, and Yew. GGEZ is a Rustlang framework designed for 2D game development. Tauri is a popular framework for Rust developers who want to build desktop applications for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. Yew is a component-based framework that allows developers to use WebAssembly to build web apps, with complete JavaScript interoperability and built-in multithreading support. However, these frameworks were not as frequently discussed as Actix-web, Rocket, Tide, and Warp.

Jump to top

Research

"https://www.kofi-group.com/top-5-rustlang-frameworks-in-2021/"

  • Rustlang is a modern programming language known for its memory safety and additional features.
  • Rustlang is a general-purpose language that is capable of being used for a variety of things, including websites, games, and GUIs.
  • The Stack Overflow Developer Survey has voted Rustlang the “most loved programming language” every year since 2016.
  • The webpage lists the top 5 Rustlang frameworks for 2021:
    • GGEZ is a Rustlang framework for 2D game development that aims to implement an API based on the LÖVE game framework. Its goal is to be a good base for game development, without a million additions and plugins.
    • ROCKET is a highly customizable web development framework that is accessible and universal, and prioritizes speed. It is completely type-safe, has no boilerplate code, and allows you to handle new requests as functions that are transformed into an HTTP response automatically.
    • TAURI is a framework that allows Rust developers to build desktop applications for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. It is highly secure with a “security first” design, and allows developers to ship chosen API endpoints, randomize functional handles at runtime, and more.
    • YEW is a component-based framework that allows developers to use WebAssembly to build web apps. It has complete JavaScript interoperability and built-in multithreading support.
    • ACTIX WEB is a simple, secure, and efficient framework for simple web development in Rustlang. It is highly stable, running on the most recent stable build of Rustlang, and offers type safety in requests.
  • Rustlang has a variety of use cases, including operating systems, game engines, and clients for Ethereum and Tor. Redox and Theseus are two complete operating systems based on Rust; Discord uses Rust in its backend and client-side video encoding; Tor has experimented with porting from C to Rustlang for its security features; Bevy and Amethyst are two game engines that encourage large-scale projects and integrating with third-party libraries; Lighthouse and OpenEthereum are two Ethereum clients that are fast and secure; and Rustlang has been used for web engines, JavaScript compilers, and customizable prompts for terminals.
  • The webpage offers resources for learning more about Rustlang and improving careers, and encourages contact with Kofi Group to help with hiring.
  • The webpage is a blog post by Kofi Group, and includes metadata such as the author, date, and language.

"https://www.slant.co/topics/5733/~web-frameworks-for-rust"

  • A page generated by Slant.com lists the top 13 web frameworks
  • The frameworks included are suitable for use with rust
  • Actix is listed as the most popular framework and has several components in its ecosystem, including Actix-web, Actix-rt, and Actix-net. It boasts a lot of features out of the box, including support for WebSockets, HTTP/2, and pipelining, among others. Actix framework is very fast, principled, and provides safety and scalability to applications.
  • Rocket is listed as the second-best Rust web framework and makes use of Rust’s code generation tools to provide a clean API. Rocket is easy to use and has support for features like streams, cookies, and template rendering, among others. However, it only uses nightly versions of Rust, and the framework is no longer active.
  • Warp is a simple framework that builds on top of hyper. It is fast, simple, and tested and correct. It supports web sockets and provides stream processing for both HTTP and WebSockets.
  • Tide is a modular framework that does not have any specific features of its own but allows developers to add their own libraries to be used by the framework. Tide is built on top of the async-std runtime, supporting async-await out of the box, which improves performance.
  • Nickle offers a variety of features, including a flexible routing system and middleware for extensibility. Nickle’s default error handler strives to cover everything encountered in web applications, and it comes equipped with a testing library and easy templating.
  • Gotham is a Rust web framework built to provide a secure, faster, and more maintainable solution to web development. It boasts async everything, blazingly fast, statically typed, and stability-focused features that give it an edge over other frameworks.
  • Rustful offers a variety of features, including an integrated set of Iron macros and static functions. Rustful also aims to provide good performance, better safety, and high extensibility to web applications.
  • Gotham, Pencil, Rustless, Iron, Conduit, and Rouille are Rust web frameworks with different approaches to development, with some being more flexible than others and some offering broader features than others.
  • The webpage includes images and videos of each Rust web framework and provides information about their various pros and cons.

"https://blog.logrocket.com/the-best-rust-frameworks-to-check-out-in-2019/"

  • Rust programming language can be used for building web applications and desktop applications.
  • Rust frameworks can help developers build fast, scalable, memory-efficient software. Frameworks provide tools, helpers, and libraries to quickly and effortlessly build, test, and run applications.
  • Key aspects to look for when choosing a framework are its architecture and features, such as support for customization, flexibility, extensibility, security, compatibility with other libraries.
  • The article showcases several Rust frameworks across different niches; namely, four Rust frameworks for web development and three for building desktop applications.
  • Rocket is one of the mature, production-ready, full-stack web frameworks. It supports JSON out of the box and is flexible and usable. Rocket comes with built-in templating support, unit testing library, and a configuration system.
  • Actix is based on Rust’s powerful actor system and is the fastest web framework according to a benchmark. It is suitable for writing services with hard logic and components and has a boilerplate code that can be a quick start for creating web applications.
  • Nickel is a simple and lightweight foundation for web applications written in Rust. It is non-opinionated about how developers should write their code. Nickel supports defining templates with mustache.rs, mapping JSON data directly onto the struct, and providing default ErrorHandler.
  • Yew is a modern framework for building multi-threaded web-client apps with WebAssembly. It packs reusable component architecture and service concept, using WebWorkers API to spawn agents in separate threads. However, testing is not wholesome in yew yet.
  • Azul is a free, functional, immediate-mode GUI framework for the rapid development of desktop applications written in Rust. It provides cross-platform GUI toolkit, an immediate-mode API, widgets are composed via function composition, built-in controls for common user interface elements, create custom widgets via function composition, hardware-accelerated OpenGL rendering, and CSS styling engine, etc.
  • Conrod is a portable, 2D, GUI library for Rust. It provides an immediate-mode API that wraps a retained-mode widget state graph, allowing for the exposure of a simple, robust, and reactive interface while approaching the performance of traditional, retained GUI frameworks.
  • Rust Qt binding generator is based on Qt and is a trademark feature of Rust. It is mature, provides cross-platform software development, the code is compiled to native binaries that run at full speed, etc.
  • The article recommends using LogRocket for monitoring and tracking performance of Rust apps. LogRocket records everything that happens on Rust apps and can monitor CPU

"https://kerkour.com/rust-web-framework-2022"

  • Actix Web, Warp, and Axum are the most popular Rust web frameworks to use in 2022.
  • Actix Web is a famous framework known for its speed, pragmatism, and power. It has over 5 million total downloads and around 13.3k Github stars.
  • Warp is another popular web framework with around 4.1 million total downloads and 6k Github stars. It claims to serve the web at warp speeds.
  • Axum is a web framework that focuses on ergonomics and modularity, developed by the Tokio team. It has around 235k total downloads and 3.6k Github stars.
  • The website lists other frameworks, such as Hyper, Rocket, Tide, Poem, Rouille, and Iron, but these were not included in the comparison as they’re either too young, too low-level, lack async-await support, don’t support Tokio or are no longer maintained.
  • The performance of frameworks is deemed sufficient for most use cases, and there are no micro-benchmarks provided. It’s also mentioned that the frameworks’ performance can be tested in a specific setup.
  • The website provides data on each framework’s ecosystem and community, such as Github stars, the number of third-party crates, the number of official examples, open and closed issues.
  • Actix Web has the largest ecosystem and community, followed by Warp and then Axum.
  • The website provides code examples for JSON deserialization for each framework. All frameworks provide easy JSON deserialization using generics, but Axum and Actix-Web provide helpers for extracting typed body payloads, making their implementation more straightforward.
  • Routing implementations are also provided with code examples. Axum was stated as the clear winner, followed by Actix-Web then Warp.
  • The middlewares are also compared with code examples. Actix-Web and Warp provide more straightforward middleware implementations with helpers to automatically extract typed payloads, compared to Axum’s less straightforward implementation.
  • Overall, Axum is commended for being part of the Tokio project, which has a large community.

"https://blog.logrocket.com/top-rust-web-frameworks/"

  • Rust is a popular language among developers due to its high-performance, reliability, speed, and open-source features.
  • A web framework is a software tool that supports the development of web applications and can range from small codebases to large ones for enterprise applications.
  • Web frameworks can provide web services, resources, and APIs to help bring ideas to life and make coding more efficient by standardizing building and automating common tasks.
  • Factors to consider for choosing the best Rust web framework include security, flexibility, community growth, project size, releases, documentation, and community support.
  • For frontend development, Rust has multiple web frameworks, including Stdweb, Yew, Percy, Smithy, Sauron, Dioxus, Iced, and Tauri.
  • WebAssembly (Wasm) is a type of coding with low-level languages that can run in modern web browsers. Rust uses a tool called ‘wasm-pack’ to assemble and package crates that target Wasm.
  • Stdweb is a frontend standard library that enables Rust to communicate directly with JavaScript web APIs. The library supports closures, arbitrary structures, and the standard components of web APIs.
  • Yew is an improved version of stdweb. It is component-based and has features similar to stdweb. However, it does not have stability and production-readiness.
  • Percy is a toolkit for building SPAs and managing user interfaces, such as screen size optimization for specific browsers. Percy needs improvement for better structure, optimal boilerplate, and bug fixes.
  • Sauron is a micro frontend framework inspired by The Elm Architecture, supporting events, state management and components. Sauron uses a library called html2sauron to convert HTML to Sauron view code for rendering optimization.
  • Dioxus is a UI library based on a virtual DOM. Designed to be React-like, it provides support for cross-platform age for web, mobile, and desktop, with features including component-based architecture, async, type safety, and more.
  • Iced is a GUI library that supports reactive programming, inbuilt widgets, and async. It incorporates Elm-style architecture with a modular/reusable component-based architecture with type safety and simplicity.
  • Tauri is a Rust library built as a light JavaScript framework for building desktop apps with the integration of any frontend technology that renders HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a web view for its UI.
  • Backend web frameworks in Rust include Rocket, Actix, Axum, warp, Gotham, Rouille, Thruster, Tide, and

"https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/2020-07-04-choosing-a-rust-web-framework-2020-edition/"

  • actix-web, rocket, tide, and warp are the main web frameworks in the Rust ecosystem as of July 2020.
  • The article examines these frameworks based on several factors, including comprehensiveness, community and adoption, sync vs async, documentation, tutorials and examples, and API and ergonomics.
  • actix-web, tide, and warp are slim web frameworks that offer an HTTP web server, routing logic, middleware infrastructure, and basic building blocks and abstractions to parse, manipulate, and respond to HTTP requests.
  • rocket takes a different approach and aims to be batteries-included, with functionality provided out-of-the-box by rocket itself.
  • Community size is important for production usage, supporting crates for the framework, and the amount of tutorials, articles, and helping hands available.
  • The number of total downloads and daily downloads are a good gauge for community size. As of July 2020, actix-web has the largest community in the Rust web framework ecosystem, followed by rocket, warp, and tide.
  • Frameworks available in other ecosystems can be compared to the Rust frameworks. actix-web, tide, and warp are compared to Flask from Python or Express from JavaScript, while rocket is compared to Django from Python or Symfony from PHP.
  • async/await support and futures runtimes are important considerations when choosing a web framework. actix-web, warp, and tide all have async/await support, while rocket is still synchronous. actix-web and rocket use tokio as their futures runtime, while tide uses async-std.
  • The async runtime is a dependency of your project, and the two main general-purpose async runtimes currently available in Rust are tokio and async-std.
  • Good documentation, tutorials, and examples are important for working within teams. Rust’s tooling treats documentation as a first-class concept, and library authors generally take it seriously.
  • actix-web and rocket provide high-level guides on the respective websites, and all frameworks maintain a rich collection of examples as part of their codebases.
  • actix-web is recommended as the best pick for writing a production-ready API in Rust as of July 202

"https://ourcodeworld.com/articles/read/1823/the-best-rust-web-frameworks-in-2023"

  • The webpage provides a comprehensive list of the top Rust web frameworks of 2023.
  • Rust is a programming language that is ideal for web development due to its excellent performance, superior memory safety, and rich set of features.
  • Web frameworks are software libraries that provide a standard way to build and deploy web applications. Rust web frameworks offer numerous advantages over other frameworks such as excellent performance, superior memory safety, and a wide range of features.
  • Rocket is a popular Rust web framework that makes it easy to write fast web applications without sacrificing flexibility or type safety. It follows a “convention over configuration” approach and integrates tightly with the Rust ecosystem.
  • Tide is a clean and easy-to-use Rust web framework that provides support for asynchronous/await programming, type-safe routing, request guards, templating support, session management, and websockets support.
  • Actix-web is a high-speed Rust web framework that supports asynchronous I/O, multiplexing, WebSockets, and middleware support. It is based on the Actor model and has a robust set of features for building web applications.
  • Warp is a fast and flexible Rust web server framework that supports automatic TLS, HTTP/2, Server-Sent Events (SSE), Websockets, path and query parameters, JSON body parsing, Multipart forms, and static file serving.
  • Axum is a Rust web framework that is designed to be fast, lightweight, and efficient. It is inspired by the Erlang programming language and provides support for the Erlang-inspired actor model for concurrency, low-latency and high performance, and support for WebSockets and other protocols.
  • Hyper is a Rust web framework built on top of the Rust standard library that provides support for asynchronous I/O, HTTP2, and fast and lightweight web application development. It is easy to use and has excellent documentation.
  • All of the Rust web frameworks discussed in the webpage have strengths and weaknesses, and the choice of the best web framework depends on application-specific needs and requirements.

These comprehensive notes summarize the important points about the Rust web frameworks discussed on the webpage, which can be used later to address the query on the top Rust frameworks. The webpage provides detailed information about each framework, including its unique features and code examples. It emphasizes the strengths of Rust web frameworks and the advantages they offer over other frameworks. The notes provide a comprehensive summary of the page’s content and help in understanding the top Rust web frameworks and their use cases.

💭  Looking into

A comparison of performance and ease-of-use between the 3 most popular Rust frameworks

💭  Looking into

The top 3 Rust frameworks by popularity and why they are well-regarded