> What does Rust solve for the casual user?
If by casual user, you mean the 95% case of a back-end developer whose main job is pulling data from various sources, performing operations, and placing that data elsewhere and/or displaying it to an end user: nothing, really.
Rust excels at performance, but the bottleneck in modern web apps is going to be IO, whether that's loading data from a database or from a third-party API you're integrating with. Rust excels at correctness, but your errors are going to come from bad data and system outages which require manual intervention anyway. Rust excels at security, but if you're using a GC language running on a Docker container on an ephemeral cloud instance, the kind of security Rust provides isn't a likely attack vector for you.
All that being said, Rust is a great language! It just has its niche, and that niche is not the typical web-dev back-end work that most developers do these days. As others have said, you'd use Rust in the same situations you'd use C++: building a database, building a web server (like nginx), etc. If you're just building a web app that talks to a database and serves HTTP responses, stick with Python/Ruby/Go/PHP.
If by casual user, you mean the 95% case of a back-end developer whose main job is pulling data from various sources, performing operations, and placing that data elsewhere and/or displaying it to an end user: nothing, really.
Rust excels at performance, but the bottleneck in modern web apps is going to be IO, whether that's loading data from a database or from a third-party API you're integrating with. Rust excels at correctness, but your errors are going to come from bad data and system outages which require manual intervention anyway. Rust excels at security, but if you're using a GC language running on a Docker container on an ephemeral cloud instance, the kind of security Rust provides isn't a likely attack vector for you.
All that being said, Rust is a great language! It just has its niche, and that niche is not the typical web-dev back-end work that most developers do these days. As others have said, you'd use Rust in the same situations you'd use C++: building a database, building a web server (like nginx), etc. If you're just building a web app that talks to a database and serves HTTP responses, stick with Python/Ruby/Go/PHP.