utoipa VS too-many-lists

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?

You seem to have a preset opinion, and I'm not sure you are interested in re-evaluating it. So this is not written to change your mind.

I've developed production code in C, C++, Rust, and several other languages. And while like pretty much everything, there are situations where it's not a good fit, I find that the solutions tend to be the most robust and require the least post release debugging in Rust. That's my personal experience. It's not hard data. And yes occasionally it's annoying to please the compiler, and if there were no trait constraints or borrow rules, those instances would be easier. But way more often in my experience the compiler complained because my initial solution had problems I didn't realize before. So for me, these situations have been about going from building it the way I wanted to -> compiler tells me I didn't consider an edge case -> changing the implementation and or design to account for that edge case. Also using one example, where is Rust is notoriously hard and or un-ergonomic to use, and dismissing the entire language seems premature to me. For those that insist on learning Rust by implementing a linked list there is https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/.

Advent of Code was okay until I encounterd a problem that required a graph, tree or linked list to solve, where I hit a wall. Most coding exercises are similar--those requiring arrays and hashmaps and sets are okay, but complex data structures are a PITA. (There is an online course dedicated to linked lists in Rust but I couldn't grok it either). IMO you should simply skip problems that you can't solve with your current knowledge level and move on.

I feel obligated to point to the original cannon literature: https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

I started learning Rust and like how the compiler is fussy about things. My plan was to implement the data structures I knew, but I got stuck at the singly linked list's remove() method. I've read the book as well, but I have no clue how to simplify this further:

My impression from the article is that Zig provides several different hashtables and not all of them are broken in this way.

This reminds me of Aria's comment in her Rust tutorial https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/ about failing to kill LinkedList. One philosophy (and the one Rust chose) for a stdlib is that this is only where things should live when they're so commonly needed that essentially everybody needs them either directly or to talk about. So, HashTable is needed by so much otherwise unrelated software that qualifies, BloomFilter, while it's real useful for some people, not so much. Aria cleaned out Rust's set of standard library containers before Rust 1.0, trying to keep only those most people would need. LinkedList isn't a good general purpose data structure, but, it was too popular and Aria was not able to remove it.

Having multiple hash tables feels like a win (they're optimized for different purposes) but may cost too much in terms of the necessary testing to ensure they all hit the quality you want.

> Cyclic references can be dealt with runtime safety checks too - like Rc and Weak.

Indeed. Starting out with code sprinkled with Rc, Weak, RefCell, etc is perfectly fine and performance will probably not be worse than in any other safe languages. And if you do this, Rust is pretty close to those languages in ease of use for what are otherwise complex topics in Rust.

A good reference for different approaches is Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

Second, once you've finished something introductory like The Book, read Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists. It really helped me to understand what ownership and borrowing actually mean in practical terms. If you don't mind paying for learning materials, a lot of people recommend Programming Rust, Second Edition by Blandy, Orendorff, and Tindall as either a complement, follow-up, or alternative to The Book.

Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists which highlights a lot of the differences with how you need to structure your code in Rust compared to other languages.