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Oh Rocket, you playful muse. I've watched you ascend from my early Rust days; yet each time I reach for you my heart sinks more. This research project of mine led me to okapi, an extension for OpenAPI documentation. And yet, I have to pass once again. While most of the Rust ecosystem blazes toward async, you inch toward it too slowly. Perhaps next time I search for a web framework our paths will align, but until then, I must follow a different orbit.
actix-web is easily to most well known, well documented, and well used web framework for Rust. What's more, it is a very active project, already making progress toward Tokio 1.0 (while at last check Rocket was still pursuing Tokio 0.2 integration). It also comes with built in support for input validation and output serialization via Rust's go-to library serde. That means all Paperclip has to do is document those same functions and structures, which it does!
All of that is to say rweb is a possible solution, but not a likely one. The product seems great, and if the code functions as well as the brief examples indicate, this is the best option from a code perspective (oops, spoilers!). Given my concerns about the community, I would have to be comfortable forking and maintaining my own version of this framework in the event that I need changes and can't wait months for a PR to be reviewed. Even if that's not the case, I'll certainly have to write much more complete documentation for my teammates to be able to use this project effectively. I'm not mortally opposed to any of that, but I'd rather avoid it if I can.
"MUST interact with a relational database (MySQL or Postgres)." Yes, warp uses Tokio (so presumably rweb does too) which is the most popular Rust async runtime, and one I can use with my preferred SQL library sqlx.
The very first project I came across when searching for the FastAPI of Rust was rweb. This is a relatively new project (just under a year old at time of writing) which seems to share a lot of similarities with our framework-to-beat. Much like FastAPI adds features to Starlette, rweb builds on top of the framework warp.
Tallying up the results, we get 7/8 "MUST" requirements met. I think that Paperclip + actix-web seems like the most promising candidate. I'm really not opposed to writing the OpenAPI v3 construction myself as I've worked with the structure a fair bit in my openapi-python-client project (shameless plug).
The biggest issue with Paperclip is that it only currently supports OpenAPI v2. There is work in progress to add v3 support, but it's just that: in progress. This means that if I really want to supplant FastAPI with this actix-web w/ Paperclip combo, I'm going to have to write my own v3 implementation. There is a GitHub Issue which talks about the intended strategy for achieving this being somehow based on converting a v2 spec to v3. I'm not sure how possible this will be considering there are some important features missing from v2. It makes more sense to me for this to be a different feature via cargo flag (or at least a different module).