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!

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.

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.