Rust

We made a bet early in the winter to rewrite our backend into Axum and Rust.

The bet is paying off now.

No memory leaks, extremely fast cold start times, leverage native crypto libraries + Alloy, sqlx has compile-time checks, AI fixes its own mistakes, and it’s entirely in a binary — no dependencies!

Our APIs will be public this fall. Hopefully it can perform as well for others as they have been for us.

Golang performance was equal to that of Rust, but culture matters a lot to me.

Would Erica or Andy enjoy writing Rust? Or the next person that picks up the codebase?

If we stuck with Golang, would it just be Google’s language?

And where is the best talent heading?

All signs pointed to Rust. It was inevitable.

v0 of our backend was TypeScript. After a certain size, it became development hell.

We were spending more time fighting the idiosyncrasies of node and TypeScript than we did writing actually code and pushing features.

Then we trialed Golang. It felt very inflexible.

Rust’s community felt more joyful and endearing.

Barista in the morning, AI engineer by day, and parent (with @shiwen) by night ||
Host at /clickcast /cpg

Is there anything counterintuitive about the way you setup prompts/context/codebase to make it work?

Yes with the right prompts, context, and codebase memory.

We are experimenting with long running coding agents to help us with autonomous lifts, e.g. major refactors to files, functions, code hygiene, upgrades.

So AI code editors handle Rust and Axum code well?

Applied AI, databases, data, vibe coding (sic.), open source, community/devrel, remote. 

itinerant businessperson. globalist.

Kuala Lumpur, Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

OK, personally not used Axum, last time I interviewed people for Rust positions, it was truly an uphill battle. But now the LLMs got so much better, embrace and extend I guess. (though sometimes the problem is some corporates just don't want you to use LLMs - yes they still exist today - "security risk")

Yeah it’s pretty good through docs and the LLMs.

I would expect any engineer we hire to pick it up without hassle.

Is there much base knowledge on Axum? Is it now easier to hire Rust developers?

Bet well placed, rust really turns backend into a fortress. Axum + sqlx + native crypto is chef’s kiss