Rust still has a way to go for being a mature eco-system for doing any serious web programming work. Given the focus of Rust on systems programming, I will still be careful to consider it for anything web related.
Hopefully situations like abandoning a project suddenly will not happen again. [1] [2]
This post is for the original actor architecture. The next architecture, which should have never been called actix, was based on a completely different architecture. This second version prevailed and remains in use today, as actix-net. Actix-web v2 uses actix-net. It features async-await syntax, is feature complete, and the architecture is mature. The project includes a guide, api docs, a vast collection of examples, and growing ecosystem. Actix-net is very high-performance.
The main concern about any actix project was related to poorly communicating uses of unsafe code, refusing to codify a policy about unsafe, and working with others, respectfully, to address real undefined behaviors.
The author has retired from the projects, for now. Others have stepped up to maintain and improve. It's very exciting to see people addressing unsafe blocks. Most importantly, actix-web lives on!
The expectations and treatment of authors who spend hundreds of hours on bleeding edge, open source work is also a major problem. This problem isn't specific to Rust, either.
Yuki (John Titor on GitHub), Rob and I are well on our way removing concerning `unsafe`s wherever we can. Sadly, there are some breaking changes but that's not stopping us and we're now headed to a 3.x release. No timeline on that just yet.
The community has bounced back quite a bit ever since the transition and I'm hopeful that actix-web will continue to be the leader-ish of Rust web development!
Just the other day we even had the first example mix some async_std into the mix (obviously, yes, some runtime weirdness with this)! https://github.com/actix/examples/tree/master/multipart-asyn...
Happy to answer any questions y'all might have!
With many (most?) Rust web frameworks now supporting async, I'd feel a lot more comfortable recommending it for 'serious' web programming work to teams interested in learning Rust.
Sadly this seems to be lost on the npm and npm-adjacent crowd, who installs gigs of random people's personal projects for breakfast.