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Yeah, I've been using Django since 0.97 (almost 20 years) and have made similar switches on my personal apps, converting to Go, Elixir/Phoenix, or Rust/Axum depending on the app and my mood. Performance with Django was "fine" and I never had problems, but it's hard to argue with a 10x reduction in memory usage and latency. If I had to do it myself, the friction of dealing with Rust wouldn't be worth it, but with LLMs, it's not a factor.

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I think a lot of the friction people experience with Rust slowly fades away once you learn the language and get used to the borrow checker. Once you pick it up things start to make sense and you actually feel how it helps you and gives you comfort when deploying because of the compile time checks.

But then again the language its very verbose which some do not like. Other downside is definitely compile times.

I'm reasonably comfortable with Rust but especially for smaller projects like the kind of low traffic scratch-my-own-itch web apps where security or correctness weren't terribly important that I was talking about, there's no question it was not as productive as something like Python or Ruby in the pre-LLM world (especially for someone with decades of Django/Rails experience). Now though, I'll use it even for a quick one-off dataviz experiment because the only real "cost" is an extra line or two of prompting to tell it to use Rust and Axum. OK, and compile times, I guess. But on a small codebase even that's not too bad.

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