For more than a decade, all progress in backend web development was focused on iteration speed, flexibility, and developer experience. We now realize that was a short-term perspective, optimized for initial success without a long term vision. Teams face substantial challenges around maintainability and stability that eventually also impact their velocity. In response to that, there’s a movement back to strong typing with TypeScript, Sorbet, Hack, and others. Yet, all of those compile back to their underlying, rather inefficient, languages, missing out on all the efficiency improvements strong types and compilation would allow.

In this talk, I want to make the point how Rust is the logical next step for backend web development as it combines improved maintainability and stability with performance that was previously impossible to achieve for most teams. I’ll talk about the state of the web development ecosystem for Rust, challenges that come with adopting it, and share some real world examples to show what’s possible (and how easy it is).