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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Many make the same argument about Laravel, Symfony, ASP.NET, etc.

There's a huge amount of value in having an ecosystem of components that are designed to work together, and randomly choosing "oauth X" and "smtp Y" components and trying to string them together, vs using a battle-tested and supported stack, just invites a lot of hurt.

If you have a team of Java web app devs, having them build a web app in Rust or Go will be incredibly costly and inefficient. It seems very obvious to me, but I still get people that say "oh, it's not that hard - library X can do all of that other stuff"... but inevitably it can't. And the communities of people doing web app stuff in (Rust, Go, Scala, etc) just aren't big enough to provide the community support other frameworks provide.

Kudos to the author for their epiphany.

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This is basically the outcome of not having fulfilled this: https://ntietz.com/blog/rust-needs-a-web-framework-for-lazy-...

I am unapologetic about despising Ruby - Rails is pretty darn good, though. The Rails and Djangos of the programming worlds are critical for many teams that shouldn't be building their own frameworks from scratch (for any number of reasons).

Attempts are being made (https://loco.rs/) and time will tell if Rust can put together a compelling story for this use case.

100%. Python and Ruby are used for web dev because of Rails and Django, not the other way around.

There's no reason why Rust can't have its own Django. And the day it does I might switch to it for my new web development gigs. In the mean time having access to all my tools with a promise of stability and uniformity will beat the convenience of any one specific language.

Rust already has several Flask equivalents (Actix, Axum, etc.)

Rust is well on the way to having a Rails/Django.

Seriously? What's the project?

There are about a half dozen "Rails-inspired" Rust frameworks under development. They're probably a little too early to start using in production, and you should stick with Actix/Axum Flask-style frameworks for the time being.

That said, here are a few examples:

- https://loco.rs/

- https://github.com/levkk/rwf

- https://tokio.rs/blog/2024-10-23-announcing-toasty (Tokio is beginning to assemble the pieces: Axum, Toasty, etc.)

> There's no reason why Rust can't have its own Django

I'd argue that the ability to do `python manage.py shell` and get an interactive ORM session for debugging is a fairly major reason why Rust can't have it's own Django.

Except for the sky high complexity cost, you could expose a scripting api that could connect to the database and inspect things that didn't use rust.

I don't know if that's a good idea, but for much of what I personally used the django shell for (did this record get written the way I expected) it could help. Wouldn't help for situations where you want to monkeypatch the running app at runtime (but it's arguable whether you'd want to do that anyway).

At that point you’re more likely to just go straight to the database though, it sort of defeats the purpose.

I like your article, a big thing I think you miss though is 'database migrations' which I think Django does brilliantly well at managing for you.

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