aya VS utoipa

In my last article, I briefly explained starting a project with rust-aya, including using their scaffolding generator. If you need a refresher, feel free to revisit that article or check the rust-aya documentation.

The scaffolding provided by rust-aya includes everything we need to start building our program. By specifying the program type in the command, as we did with program_type=xdp, it sets up the necessary base for that specific type of program. For more detailed information on how all this works, it's a good idea to check out the documentation on the rust-aya website.

https://github.com/aya-rs/aya is very interesting, used to power this.

Would love to see the final results of this hacking in a git repo.

Now I'm back to learning about eBPF with the help of this great book by Liz Rice. I'm using libbpf-rs and converting the book examples into Rust (except for the actual bpf programs, which are in C, I have plans of coming back and converting everything to Rust with aya). If you're interested in eBPF stuff, and want to check out it with Rust here is my repo which could be helpful (almost every piece of code is commented).

In case anyone was wondering, the link to the Aya book towards the end of this post is wrong. It points you to:

https://aya-rs.dev/

Which has almost no content other than a spartan TOC. The actual book URL is here:

https://aya-rs.dev/book/

[GitHub - aya-rs/aya: Aya is an eBPF library for the Rust programming language, built with a focus on developer experience and operability.](https://github.com/aya-rs/aya) [GitHub - kentik/convis](https://github.com/kentik/convis) [Implement an eBPF decompiler/disassembler · Issue #838 · capstone-engine/capstone · GitHub](https://github.com/capstone-engine/capstone/issues/838)

The biggest difference is that it doesn't depend on or call into libbpf (pure Rust). The interface is also intended to make it really easy to manage lots of different probes that may or may not load across several kernel versions, so you can write-once-run-anywhere. The motivations are pretty similar to aya, but with a more limited feature set and emphasis on production stability across many kernels.

Use and contribute to Aya, an open source eBPF library for Rust https://github.com/aya-rs/aya

In case you didn't know https://github.com/juhaku/utoipa is really nice to generate openapi spec and have a swagger!

play-swagger [2] for scala + play. They generate a significant portion of your spec for you, then a client can be generated from the spec.

[1] https://github.com/juhaku/utoipa

[2] https://github.com/iheartradio/play-swagger

utoipa

Latest release notes: https://github.com/juhaku/utoipa/releases/tag/utoipa-3.0.0

I've written a few backend APIs with rust and I have to disagree. Not only have the frameworks managed to get the ergonomics similar to your popular GC lang[0][1], the natural lack of shared mutable state of HTTP handlers means you very rarely have to encounter lifetimes and a lot of the language's advanced features. What's more, now when I go back to work with other languages, I can't help but notice the significant number of unit tests I'd not have had to write in Rust. It doesn't have a Rails and Django but it's an easy pick over anything at the language level.

A note on performance, Rust's the only langauge where I haven't had the need to update my unit test harnesses to `TRUNCATE` data base data instead of creating a separate db per test on PostgresSQL.

I'll also like to mention the gem that is SQLx[1]. As someone who's never been satisfied with ORMs, type checked SQL queries that auto-populate your custom types is revolutionary. With the error-prone langauge-SQL boundary covered, I was surprised just how good it can get making use of the builtin PostgreSQL features. Almost to the point that amount of effort the community's put to building great tools like Prisma.js and feel like a fool's errand (at least so for PosgreSQL).

[0]: https://github.com/alexpusch/rust-magic-function-params

[1]: https://github.com/juhaku/utoipa

[3]: lib.rs/crates/sqlx

Going to strongly disagree here. This isn't necessary in most cases. You likely do not need to test actix-web. actix-web already has more tests than you can possibly think of for exercising its correctness. So why do you need to black-box test it? Further, if your concern is an API client integrating with the API, use code generation not tests to ensure correctness! Generate your clients from a spec generated from your types! I recommend Swagger/OpenAPI or JSON Schema. Here's a nice library for doing this: https://github.com/juhaku/utoipa

utoipa: supports most popular frameworks

Something like that is planned in future releases. There is a closed discussion in Github https://github.com/juhaku/utoipa/issues/201 and traits for this already exists but the derive implementaiton is yet to be done.

Those tags next function parameters look cool. Do you maybe know a crate Utoipa and could share differences between the two crates for those who want to quickly compare them? I've been using utoipa but also I've been following the discussion on Axum's repo about OpenAPI integration in hope for something more comfortable to write. Taking a quick peek they seem very similar but I'm guessing the approach is slightly different?