rust-script VS actix-web

There is also rust-script[1] which runs "Rust files and expressions as scripts without any setup or compilation step." I wrote a data loader[2] in it for my Observable Framework project and have been very happy with its performance and overall ease including hot-reloading.

[1] https://rust-script.org

[2] https://observablehq.com/framework/loaders#routing

To address your concerns about non-trivial building process making Rust less suitable for small scripts : https://rust-script.org/ Work is actively being done. (not by me)

I started this as a little script made with rust-script, which took only a few hours to mock up, and then I was able to refactor the core logic into a much larger scriptable system over only about a day. And, Rust being Rust, it worked first time once I got it compiling! Also, I have to say, having a full-blown custom scripting engine just work is a novelty coming from web programming, and Rhai is a great choice if you need this sort of functionality in your own projects!

Use rust-script ! Instead of having a folder for each script, your script could be a single file, just like you would in python. Then you can put all the files in a single directory with a readme describing the functionality and use-case of each script.

In case you didn't notice in the Prior Art section, rust-script is the most actively maintained descendant of cargo-script (from which the cargo-eval crate is forked as well).

Someone even wrote https://rust-script.org/ to make that "shell scripting using Rust" use-case more convenient.

Is rust-script close enough?

That may have been more of the originator of the idea, but what I believe I had used was rust-script, looking into it more. That one isn't maintained.

If you want that, check out rust-script.

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