Introduction

Apollo GraphQL and AWS are significantly investing in Rust, a language known for its superior performance and security.

Rust’s Capabilities

Despite its challenging learning curve, Rust offers capabilities that surpass other languages in performance and security. It is highly regarded for its exacting compiler standards and minimal garbage collection concerns.

Apollo’s Adoption of Rust

At the GraphQL Summit in New York, Apollo announced its shift to Rust for its query handling. This change aims to enhance efficiency and reliability in search functionalities, moving away from JavaScript.

AWS’s Use of Rust

During P99 CONF, Carl Lerche from AWS highlighted Rust’s growing use within AWS’s infrastructure, specifically mentioning the open-source Tokio framework and Toast platform.

Strategic Decisions at Apollo

Matt DeBergalis of Apollo GraphQL discussed the strategic decision to transition to Rust, emphasizing its benefits for Apollo’s search engine and long-term development strategy.

Toasty ORM Library

Lerche also introduced Toasty, an ORM library for Rust, designed to prioritize ease of use while supporting SQL and some NoSQL databases. It aims to streamline database operations across different contexts.

Challenges and Innovations

Lerche addressed the ecosystem split between SQL-supporting ORMs and other database libraries, suggesting that Toasty’s unified approach could reduce the learning curve and improve user familiarity.

Apollo’s New Query Planner

Apollo’s new query planner in Rust, part of its router, offers significant performance boosts and multithreading capabilities. DeBergalis noted a 10-fold improvement in execution time for query planning.

Conclusion

Apollo and AWS’s adoption of Rust underscores the language’s growing importance in performance-critical infrastructure, marking a notable shift in the tech landscape.