Rust: A Productive Language For Writing Database Applications
InfoQ, Thursday, June 12th, 2025
Carl Lerche discusses Rust's potential as a productive language for building higher-level applications like web apps and backends, traditionally seen as performance-sensitive domains. He explains how Rust's quality benefits can translate to long-term productivity and shares practical tips and tricks for using Rust effectively.
Lerche: I'm Carl. I work on Tokio primarily, the open source async runtime. I probably started that about six, seven, eight years ago now. Now I'm doing that. I'm still working on that at Amazon. I'm at Amazon, but I'm working on Tokio there, so I'm on the open-source team. I'm going to try to convince you that Rust can be a productive language for building higher level applications, like those web apps that sit on top of databases, like the apps that back mobile apps or web apps.
Even if I don't convince you, I'm going to try to have you leave with something of value, I'm going to give you some tips and tricks that will be generally useful working with Rust. How many people here have already written Rust? You've heard of Rust, I assume here. You're not here for the Rust computer game. It's ok. You don't have to know Rust, but you know a little bit about it. Who already believes that Rust is generally useful for higher level use cases, that are not performance sensitive? Hands up, you're like, "Yes, I will use Rust for building a web app now. It's the best language for everything".