tracing VS actix-web

The video description is as follows:

In this stream, we peel back the crust on the tracing crate — https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/ — and explore its interface, structure, and mechanisms. We talk about spans, events, their attributes and fields, and how to think about them in async code. We also dig into what subscribers are, how they pick up events, and how you can construct your own subscribers through the layer abstraction. For more details about tracing, see https://docs.rs/tracing/latest/tracing/.

> What's been your biggest issues around ergonomics/amenities for OpenTelemetry?

I can't speak generally, but in the Rust ecosystem the various crates don't play well together. Here's one example: <https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/issues/2648> There are four crates involved (tracing-attributes, tracing-opentelemetry, opentelemetry, and opentelemetry-datadog) and none of them fit properly into any of the others.

The tracing (logging) mechanism in an asynchronous codebase (tracing).

Tracing is Tokio's alternative for async code.

At a technical level, in Rust, both [tracing]https://crates.io/crates/tracing) and log are entire ecosystems (though for the latter at least there's also third party logging frameworks), and there's at least a bridge from log to tracing.

I am using https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing for logging purposes in my application. I would like to develop a feature wherein logs should be saved to a database table (via sea-orm). Something similar is this, but it does not solve my needs fully.

I've used the tracing infrastructure with tracing_flame to profile some hot paths in async code: https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/tree/master/tracing-flame

Oh nice! IIRC when I checked, it was the Unicode tables that smashed the code size. I recently hit the same issue with the tracing crate, where a crate feature (for env var filtering) pulled in regex and my binary was suddenly 1MB bigger.

I know about tools such as tracing, jaeger or tracy. While having a complete tracing could be a potential solution, these tools don't work with no_std.

tracing by itself only outputs log data, you need to consume them in a subscriber, the tracing-subscriber crate exists for this. (example)

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