diesel VS sailfish

7. Diesel

Both seem nice. However, both of them rely very heavily on prepared statements. Unfortunately, using prepared statements is a no-go when you use connection poolers like pgbouncer, or in my case AWS RDS proxy. A discussion in Diesel indicates that disel is not going to provide any support for disabling prepared stements (https://github.com/diesel-rs/diesel/discussions/3575), and a discussion on sqlx hints that disabling prepared statements is possible, but I haven't found any documentation or examples for it.

In addition we are experimenting with prebuild versions of diesel-cli that can be installed directly. We have a set of prebuilt binaries here. We are interested in feedback about how the provided binaries work on your platform.

First of all thanks for making this great tool. As it happens I currently toy around with using it for diesel-cli releases. See the WIP PR here. I think diesel-cli is a good example of a tool that depends on system libraries as it needs to link native database drivers, so this new release is welcome. Defining the dependencies seems to allow easily building things on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu and x86_64-apple-darwin. It seems to pick up everything in the right way there.

I did look at mysql initially. Then I started checking other crates. Diesel is an Object Relation Model (ORM), I'm not yet keen on taking on the complication of learning ORM, I give this crate a pass in the meantime.

I would recommend people look at diesel from Rust for how nice it could be. https://diesel.rs/ Look at the complex queries example. So much more readable and easier to understand.

Most wanted missing features in diesel

There are two problems with using Rust for web servers:

1. The only production-ready Rust web servers require writing async request handlers. Async Rust is not fun.

2. The only good Postgres client library is async: https://crates.io/crates/sqlx

I'm trying to remedy the first problem with https://crates.io/crates/servlin .

Solving the second problem will be another project. I hope someone else does it. There is https://crates.io/crates/diesel but it has the same problem as async Rust: incomprehensible compiler errors.

Lemmy is written in Rust using Actix Web and Diesel.rs.

https://actix.rs/

https://diesel.rs/

Any recommendations for rust template engines? I'd like something that can easily render labeled fragments of a template instead of requiring me to split a page into a dozen little files. Kinda like inline {{block}} definitions in Go's html/template. Speed is also nice.

From template-benchmark-rs [0] I found sailfish [1] (fast, but no fragments(?)). render-rs [2] and syn-rsx [3] (2022) both let you write html in rust macros which is cool (maybe that can substitute for fragments?). Then there's gtmpl-rust [4] which is just Go templates reimplemented in rust.

[0]: https://github.com/rosetta-rs/template-benchmarks-rs

[1]: https://github.com/rust-sailfish/sailfish

[2]: https://github.com/render-rs/render.rs last updated Jul 2020

[3]: https://github.com/stoically/syn-rsx last updated Nov 2022

[4]: https://github.com/fiji-flo/gtmpl-rust

Sailfish (very fast, but lots of unsafe usages)

(Sailfish is fastest, but it's syntax is of the more traditional <%= msg %> flavour and Markup.rs is second-fastest with a Maud-like syntax but the author apparently doesn't have time to rewrite the syntax reference, so you have to follow a link from the open issue to an old version of the README.)

Using [Actix](actix.rs/), Sailfish, thiserror, and a bunch of supporting libraries reminds me of when I was building a project using Pylons and Mako (now replaced with Pyramid), except without the SQL.

If you're OK with a template engine that can't be used in any sort of "if debug builds, support hot reloading" mode, Sailfish compiles its templates to native code and it's the fastest option around.