The Advantages of Rust Backend over TypeScript

In recent years the popularity of Rust is booming, and for good reason. For backend systems where performance is critical, Rust offers exponential advantages over Node.js. In this blog, we will cover the difference in performance between Actix Web, a Rust web framework, and Express, a mature and widely-used Node.js web framework. Actix Web is renowned for being multi-threaded and blazingly fast, while Express.js is known for its simplicity and robust ecosystem.

Advantages of Actix Web over Express

1. Performance and Efficiency

When it comes to raw performance, Rust’s Actix Web consistently outperforms Node.js’s Express. Benchmarks show that Actix Web can handle a significantly higher number of requests per second with lower latency. One study found that under heavy load, Actix provides a 6x faster response time than Node.js. This performance gap is attributed to several factors:

• Compiled vs. Interpreted: Rust is a compiled language that compiles to native machine code, eliminating the need for a runtime interpreter like Node.js’s V8 engine. This results in faster execution speeds and more efficient CPU utilization.
• Memory Management: Rust guarantees memory safety without a garbage collector. In contrast, Node.js relies on a garbage collector, which can introduce unpredictable pauses and increase memory consumption. On a long run of 1 million requests, an Actix service’s memory footprint was around 26MB, while a Node.js service grew to 104MB.
• Concurrency and Parallelism: Actix Web is built on a powerful actor model and leverages Rust’s async/await for highly concurrent and scalable applications. It can efficiently utilize multiple CPU cores by default, minimizing context switches. While Node.js can use a cluster module to leverage multiple cores, this often results in duplicated memory usage for each new process.

2. Memory Safety without Garbage Collection

Rust’s ownership model is a key feature that ensures memory safety at compile time. This prevents common bugs like null pointer dereferences, buffer overflows, and data races without the overhead of a garbage collector. This makes Actix Web a great choice for applications where safety is critical, such as in financial or healthcare systems.

3. Reliability and Type Safety

Rust’s strong type system and compiler checks help catch errors during development, leading to more reliable and robust code at runtime. This can reduce debugging time compared to JavaScript, where issues might only surface during execution. Actix Web leverages Rust’s type safety, ensuring that everything from the request to the response has a defined type.

4. Cost Savings

The superior performance and lower resource consumption of an Actix Web backend can translate into significant cost savings. By requiring less CPU power and memory, you can run your applications on smaller, less expensive servers. One analysis suggested a potential for 75%-95% runtime cost savings with a basic, unoptimized Actix Web setup compared to Express.js.

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Considerations and Trade-offs

While the advantages of Rust and Actix Web are clear, there are important factors to consider:

1. Learning Curve: Rust has a steeper learning curve compared to TypeScript, especially for developers new to systems programming concepts like ownership and lifetimes. TypeScript, being a superset of JavaScript, is generally easier for web developers to pick up.

2. Ecosystem Maturity: The Node.js ecosystem, with its vast collection of libraries and frameworks on npm, is more mature and extensive than Rust’s. This means you are more likely to find a ready-made solution for a particular problem in the Node.js world.

3. Development Speed: For rapid prototyping and applications where raw performance is not the primary concern, TypeScript and Express can offer a faster development experience.

Conclusion

The choice between a Rust backend with Actix Web and a TypeScript backend with Express ultimately depends on the specific needs of your project. For high-performance, CPU-intensive applications where reliability and efficiency are paramount, Rust and Actix Web present a compelling advantage. While TypeScript and Express remain an excellent choice for many web applications due to their ease of use and extensive ecosystem, the performance benefits and cost savings offered by Rust are making it an increasingly popular and powerful contender in the world of backend development.