actix-web VS async-std

Actix Web Documentation: Detailed documentation on using Actix-web, including examples and best practices for building web applications with Rust.

I can't speak to the "is it any good" part, but (after a bit of research) I can share what I've found. I'll try to represent things as best as I understand, but I may have some finer details mixed up.

ntex is written by the same person that started actix-web, Nikolay Kim (fafhrd91 on GitHub). There was a bunch of drama a while back due to actix-web using (what many reasoned to be) avoidable unsafe code, which was later found to be buggy. Nikolay was pilloried online, resulting in him transferring leadership of actix-web to someone else. ntex is, as I understand it, essentially Nikolay picking back up on his ideals for what could have been actix-web, if people hadn't pushed him out of his own project.

How ntex compares to the pre-/post-leadership change of actix-web, I don't know.

Here are some jumping points if you want more of the backstory.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/21/rust_actix_web_framew...

https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust

https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1289

Are you ready to embark on another journey in Rust? Today, we'll explore how to create a REST API that performs basic mathematical operations: addition, multiplication, and division. We'll use Actix, a powerful web framework for Rust, together with Rhai, a lightweight scripting language, to achieve our goal.

Within actix-web, middleware is used as a medium for being able to add general functionality to a (set of) route(s) by taking the request before the handler function runs, carrying out some operations, running the actual handler function itself and then the middleware does additional processing (if required). By default, actix-web has several default middlewares that we can use, including logging, path normalisation, access external services and modifying application state (through the ServiceRequest type).

Rust is a popular system programming language, known for its robust memory safety features and exceptional performance. While Rust was originally a system programming language, its application has evolved. Now you can see Rust in different app platforms, mobile apps, and of course, in web apps — both in the frontend and backend, with frameworks like Rocket, Axum, and Actix making it even easier to build web applications with Rust.

actix to handle HTTP requests

But maybe check out the discussion here https://github.com/async-rs/async-std/pull/631 or something (the blog post was linked on the end of it)

Have a look at these: https://github.com/async-rs/async-std/tree/main/examples

In fact, there are a lot of crates in Rust where in other programming languages, it would be included in the standard library. Examples are regex, random number generators, additional iterator methods, macros for other collections, num traits, loggers, HTTP libraries, error handling, async runtimes, serialization and deserialization, date and time, and many more.

Two major projects (non std lib but extremely commonly used) stand out in the area of async programming: Async std and Tokio - no doubt familiar to anyone that has turned an eye towards Rust for a second too long. Async architecture in general is likely very familiar to JavaScript programmers but in Rust there are some extra considerations (like ownership of the data that is thrown into an async function). Tokio is fast becoming a heavily supported and road tested async framework, with a thread scheduling runtime "baked in" that has learned from the history of Go, Erlang, and Java thread schedulers.

Ah... https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio and https://github.com/async-rs/async-std ?

async-std: Basically a Tokio alternative with a few different design decisions.

Go's solution is for the scheduler to notice after a while when a goroutine has blocked execution and to shift goroutines waiting their turn to another thread. async-std pondered a similar approach with tasks, but it proved controversial and was never merged.

This indicates curl, zlib, openssl, and libnghttp2 as well as a bunch of WASM-related things are being dynamically linked into my executable. To resolve this, I looked at the build features exposed by surf and found that it selects the "curl_client" feature by default, which can be turned off and replaced with "h1-client-rustls" which uses an HTTP client backed by rustls and async-std and no dynamically linked libraries. Enabling this build feature removed all -sys dependencies from androidx-release-watcher, allowing me to build static executables of it.

And also, the actual PR never got merged.

Async in rust needs a runtime (aka executor) to run. You can maybe get a better description from the rust docs. As an example, Tokio attempts to provide an interface for a developer that is minimal change to the more common blocking code. So you'd end up putting #[tokio::main] above your main function to spin up the executor and most of the rest of the code is similar to a non-async version with a few sprinkles of .await, which you can see in the hello world for tokio. In contrast, async-std provides a more hands-on/low-level approach. If you are unlucky enough to have libraries that choose different stacks to work on, you'll possibly (probably?) have to handle both.