Rust for Web Developers

Why Rust is becoming a critical skill for web developers and how to get started.

Introduction

Rust has been voted the "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for several years in a row. Originally designed for systems programming, it is increasingly finding its way into the web development ecosystem.

From high-performance tooling (like Turbopack and SWC) to backend services and WebAssembly modules running in the browser, Rust is everywhere.

Why Rust?

1. Memory Safety Without Garbage Collection: Rust's ownership model ensures memory safety at compile time, eliminating entire classes of bugs like null pointer dereferences and buffer overflows.
2. Performance: Rust matches C++ in performance, making it ideal for computation-heavy tasks.
3. Tooling: Cargo, Rust's package manager and build tool, is best-in-class.

The Ownership Model

The most unique feature of Rust is ownership.

• Each value in Rust has a variable that鈥檚 called its owner.
• There can only be one owner at a time.
• When the owner goes out of scope, the value will be dropped.

fn main() {
    let s1 = String::from("hello");
    let s2 = s1; // s1 is moved to s2

    // println!("{}, world!", s1); // Error! s1 is no longer valid
    println!("{}, world!", s2);
}

Rust on the Backend

Frameworks like Actix-web and Axum allow you to build incredibly fast web servers.

use actix_web::{get, post, web, App, HttpResponse, HttpServer, Responder};

#[get("/")]
async fn hello() -> impl Responder {
    HttpResponse::Ok().body("Hello world!")
}

#[actix_web::main]
async fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    HttpServer::new(|| {
        App::new()
            .service(hello)
    })
    .bind(("127.0.0.1", 8080))?
    .run()
    .await
}

Rust in the Browser (WebAssembly)

Rust is the primary language for compiling to WebAssembly (Wasm). This allows you to run near-native speed code in the browser.

Tools like wasm-pack make it easy to compile Rust to Wasm and publish it to npm.

use wasm_bindgen::prelude::*;

#[wasm_bindgen]
pub fn greet(name: &str) {
    alert(&format!("Hello, {}!", name));
}

Conclusion

Learning Rust can be challenging due to the borrow checker, but the investment pays off in the form of robust, high-performance software. As the web platform evolves, Rust is poised to play an even bigger role in the future of web development.