Most public web apps are expected to be up pretty much all of the time, which today, means cloud hosting and horizontally scalable architecture. In such a setup, I don't see how squeezing every last drop of performance is worth it. When I can just change a number and get more instances, choosing the language with higher cognitive load is going reduce any cost savings due to lower resource usage.
Doing something as mundane as writing text to a socket just doesn't need to perform all that well. Developer effort costs more than the CPU/memory.
I've written websites with Rust simply because it's a sane modern language with few "gotchas" and a type system and borrowing system that allows you to eliminate huge classes of bugs (not just memory errors!)
That said I think the Rust web ecosystem is not super mature (especially client side) and most web frameworks use `async` which is one of the sketchiest parts of Rust IMO. So I don't think it would be entirely unreasonable to use something else. Especially Typescript, for the SSR/isomorphic apps.
I guess what's implicit in my attitude is that I think Rust introduces cognitive load that other (especially garbage-collected) languages do. There has to be enough of a win gotten to offset that. I used performance as the most likely reason I could think of.
Clojure and ClojureScript was such an interesting way to bring lisp into the browser and seemed really revolutionary. And without really limitations on what you could build. Where is the rust version of that?
I found some other alternatives, like Perseus. Do you have thoughts on it?
https://framesurge.sh/perseus/en-US/comparisons
I am interested more in it because it mentions a lack of VirtualDOM, like SolidJS (so I assume it is more like Svelte than React).
Such is life
Where Rust excels is in safety when using concurrency. Most web apps and APIs have a single thread used per request. I've also used async/futures that work fine without ownership modelling.
As for performance switching from Ruby/Python to Java/C#/Go will pay off not so much to then go to Rust unless it's a particularly high throughput or latency zensitive app in which case you'd already know it matters.
