I don’t believe you, show me this project. As a personal project I have made a monolithic web server, that handles api calls, webpage calls etc, it uses axum, tokio and serde and when I run cargo build --release it compiles down to a 1.9mb binary. The only way I can see this happening is if you’re not using a release build, which is a concept you should understand as a JS dev.

I mean if you run a basic get request with the reqwest library and compile it, 32mb. In C is a few KB. You can have chatgpt generate for you if you wanna try it yourself but not write the code. This is because rust doesn’t do proper tree shaking of code and bundles everything into it even if it’s not necessary.

What are you building where the end user doesn’t care if the app performs well? Not caring about resource usage results in poor performance which results in dissatisfied users/customers which stop doing business with you. Have you heard about the unending war in JS land against bundle size?

Yes but again with Rust it’s bikeshedding. Websites with hundreds of millions of users run on php just fine, a high level dynamic language. So why are the complexities of Rust worth it to save like 10ms loading a website? Not that as a language I like php that much due to no typing, but performance for a web app really isn’t that important.

Rust again isn’t that good for embedded either due to the large binary size. Maybe it would be good for writing a game engine or something very complex but why not just use Godot or something premade

This argument has happened a few times that I know of. This is done for security purposes. If someone ships a binary blob you have to trust it to run, as a community, it was decided that we shouldnt do this.

I get where you’re going with this but it’s not scalable. If you have to compile a large app with a lot of moving parts compiling everything from scratch wears out the CPU and takes forever. This is why oses just ship binaries for most things.

This can also be solved with a file hash. When you compile the app, ensure the compiled file hash matches the hash of the binary in cargo. So you can get the best of both worlds

No one is required to like every programming language, If you don’t like rust, stop using it.

Yes but the fact is rust is growing immensely in popularity so I made this post to understand what exactly I’m missing about it

It’s still less intuitive though, like someone looking at it doesn’t know what a hashmap or String::from is and it’s more code for the same thing. Once you start getting into Futures and Generics that’s where the real unreadability starts

But is there an actual counterargument to my point though other than just calling me a junior?

That sounds like they’re not testing their app properly then. If they don’t test every scenario then yeah there’s gonna be issues. Plus doesn’t Android use the JVM?

Stuff a solo dev usually isn’t gonna be coding. Plus nowadays if you’re serious about gaming it looks like Godot + Gdscript or C# is the best option, there’s no real point in coding an entire engine nowadays for most games.

What is it trying to solve?

I’ve seen a lot about how it solves “memory safety” but it’s not an issue if you use a garbage collector which is perfectly suitable unless you write low level embedded systems or oses, and even if you use something like C or C++ where you manually allocate or deallocate, if the app is properly tested memory issues won’t happen.

What I mean is that Rust has overly verbose and often confusing syntax. It’s difficult to look at the code and know what it does without having a ton of prior knowledge about how Rust’s syntax works, so there’s a massive upfront learning cost mostly due to syntax quirks