utoipa VS dark

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?

Yes. Darklang was originally in OCaml using js_of_ocaml, and we ported it to F# using Blazor (https://github.com/darklang/dark/tree/main/backend/src/Wasm). It works.

We found that in dotnet 6, the code was much slower, with long startup times and a much bigger download, than in js_of_ocaml. It also had a lot of issues in running in a Webworker, which wasn't the case for js_of_ocaml.

In dotnet 7, the webworker issues are better and AOT is easier, so startup is faster. Download sizes are still bad, and it's still slower than js_of_ocaml.

However, dotnet allows almost any code to run in WASM, which js_of_ocaml had large limitations. This meant a decent chunk of functionality had to be worked around to make separate js vs native targets, which also was a massive pain and took a long time. Dune's virtual targets wasn't ready at the time - I think we were one of the test cases for it.

Why should I use this instead of https://darklang.com/

First it was probably Dark. They made a lot of noise some years ago, but then I never heard of them again (looking at their current website, looks like they moved on to AI now, obviously).

Reminds me of Darklang. Personally, I don't think vendoring cloud services into a language is going to be beneficial. I'm curious how the language deals with vendor updates. Do I have to upgrade the language then? If so, I see a lot conflicts coming from this. Then it comes down to Javascript or HCL, the HCL bit makes me think that the below statement is not as truthy as it is on the surface:

We still don't have all that many users (~100 active), so I'm not sure you'll find an answer here. But we collect that sort of feedback publicly, which might answer your question: https://github.com/darklang/dark/discussions/categories/feed...

I wish I could remember what took me to YCombinator's website on the 10th of October, 2022. That was when I first heard about Wasp and another language called DarkLang. After I learned about Wasp, I was intrigued and curious to know how it works, which led me to join the discord server the next day.

Some languages that try to integrate an HTTP server and a database:

Ur/Web: http://impredicative.com/ur/

Dark (Darklang): https://darklang.com/

There are others in this space I did not assess like Encore, Shuttle, Modal, and Dark. These were not assessed for the sake of time. If you're interested in IfC, I encourage you to take a look at these others.

Oh, finally! I was waiting to build my serverless CRUD webapp in Dark (OCaml + JavaScript and Fsharp?) until they had support for returning negative numbers on a GET request!