I enjoyed using Rust/WASM for a web application I made. Once I got the build step figured out, which took a week, the application worked like I wanted right away.

I was trying to build an HTML generator in Rust and got pretty far, but I don't think I'll ever be happy with the API unless I learn some pretty crazy macro stuff, which I don't want. For the latter project, the "innovation tokens" really rings true for me, I spent months on the HTML gen for not much benefit.

For a web backend? Rust is pretty mature there, it doesn't even feel like an innovation token - it's by my favorite thing to use Rust for.

You have very mature webservers, asyncio, ORMs, auth, etc., it's very easy to write, and the type safety helps a ton.

In 2020 it might have taken some innovation tokens, but the only things that require a ton less (for web backend) are probably Java, python, and node.js, and they all have their unique pain points that it doesn't seem at all crazy?

Good to know! You probably saved me a lot of pain.