Top 5 Rustlang Frameworks in 2021

Rust language, also known as Rustlang, is one of the most highly recommended modern programming languages in the world, with the Stack Overflow Developer Survey voting it the “most loved programming language” every year since 2016, and for good reason.

Syntactically, it’s very similar to C++, but offers additional features that can make your life a whole lot easier and more secure, such as memory safety. Despite its high reputation amongst the developer community, only around 7% of the respondents to the stack overflow survey said that they used the language.

Rustlang is a general-purpose language, and this is supported by a variety of frameworks that let you develop virtually anything possible in a language, including websites, games, and GUIs. Here are The Top 5 Rustlang Frameworks in 2021 that you should definitely keep an eye on.

GGEZ

Ggez is a Rustlang framework designed to help developers create 2D games without any annoying hurdles that can serve to waste time and increase blood pressure. The README for the project describes it in great detail, explaining how “It aims to implement an API based on (a Rustified version of) the LÖVE game framework. This means it contains basic and portable 2D drawing, sound, resource loading and event handling, but finer details and performance characteristics may be different than LÖVE.”

The framework is incredibly lightweight. Game development is quite a big and complex field – it would be highly inefficient to create a framework that aims to solve every problem a developer could have. As the developers of ggez say: “ggez is not meant to be everything to everyone, but rather a good base upon which to build.” Thus, it takes a fairly batteries-included approach without needing a million additions and plugins for everything imaginable, but also does not dictate higher-level functionality such as a physics engine or entity component system. Instead, the goal is to allow you to use whichever libraries you want to provide these functions, or build your own libraries atop ggez.”

ROCKET

If you’re a web developer, you’ll definitely want to take a look at this one. Rocket is famous for being incredibly accessible and universal, whether you’re a Rustlang veteran or a newbie to the language. It is highly customizable and places speed as a top priority – you won’t have to spend too much time initializing a project before you can start coding. It also boasts being “boilerplate free”, meaning you won’t waste time writing code that doesn’t really matter – Rocket itself generates all of that automatically. It’s also completely type safe, which avoids the risk of potential server errors. Whenever you make a new request, Rocket ensures that all of the types in a given handler can be derived from the incoming request. If there’s an issue, it keeps forwarding the request to the next matching route until the types are validated or you run of out routes to try out. In the event that no matching can be made, Rocket allows you to return a customizable 404 error. It also simplifies the handling of new requests by simply making them a function that, when returning a value, is transformed into a HTTP response automatically.

TAURI

Tauri is a popular framework for Rust developers who want to build desktop applications for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. It allows you to use any front-end framework that compiles to HTML/CSS/JavaScript to build user interfaces that use a Rust backend. Tauri have expressed their philosophy of a “security first” design to their framework: “In today’s world, every honest threat model assumes that the user’s device has already been compromised. This puts app developers in a complicated situation, because if the device is already at risk, how can the software be trusted? Defense in depth is the approach we’ve taken. We want you to be able to take every precaution possible to Minimize the surface area you present to attackers. Tauri lets you choose which API endpoints to ship, whether or not you want a localhost server built into your app, and it even randomizes functional handles at runtime. These and other techniques form a secure baseline that empowers you and your users.” Tauri apps can have custom menus and have tray-type interfaces. They typically have small file sizes, since they use the OS’s web view. Overall, this makes Tauri a secure, comprehensive, and versatile framework to use for developing desktop apps.

YEW

If you want to develop web apps with WebAssembly while also using a framework design you’ll be pretty familiar with, Yew is a great choice. Its component based, so you React and Elm developers out there will feel right at home. It also boasts incredible performance due to in-built multithreading support, and has complete JavaScript interoperability. It’s not currently production-ready, but you’d be wise to start understanding how this powerful framework operates – it could be a useful framework for creating internal tools based upon the efficiencies and memory safeties offered by Rustlang.

ACTIX WEB

Actix Web, alongside Rocket, are the two main choices for web development frameworks in Rust, they both offer type safety in their requests, as well as incredibly fast speeds. However, compared to Rocket, Actix is considered to be more stable as it runs on the most recent stable build of Rustlang, while Rocket runs on Rustlang Nightly, the more “experimental” version of Rust that ships before even the Beta versions do. However, it has less features out-of-the-box in comparison, meaning that you’ll probably have to use another framework if you want to perform more complex tasks. However, if you want an efficient, secure, and intuitive framework to perform simple web development in Rustlang, Actix is a great choice.

Rustlang has a variety of use cases due to its multi-paradigm design – ranging from game development to internal back-end web development. Developers have recognized the potential for Rustlang to be the next language that every recruiter is asking for, so consider expanding your skillset to a language that is universally loved by developers everywhere, and get familiar with some of the frameworks that make it even better.

WHICH COMPANIES USE RUST?

Rust is quite a versatile language, and a variety of projects use it directly within their design. Redox and Theseus, for example, are two complete operating systems that are based on Rust. Discord uses Rust within its backend, as well as in client-side video encoding. Tor, the network infamous for its anonymity, has experimented with porting from C to Rustlang because of the security features offered by the latter. Bevy and Amethyst are two data-driven game engines that offer a variety of features that encourage large-scale projects and integration with third-party libraries. Lighthouse and OpenEthereum are two Ethereum clients that boast speed and security with a reliance on the features offered by Rustlang. Rustlang has also been used for web engines, such as Servo, JavaScript compilers, like swc, and Starship, a customizable prompt for a variety of different terminals. If you were unsure about whether Rust could be used in whatever project you were considering, you can be guaranteed that it can handle whatever you throw at it.

NEXT STEPS

If you enjoyed this blog then make sure to check out Rustland Vs. C++ Which Language Should You Learn in 2021 or Rust Programming Language: 5 Things You Need to Know to learn even more about Rust and how it can help your career.

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