Introducing the Actix Web framework

At the time of writing this book, the Actix Web framework is the most popular Rust web framework due to the number of forks, watches, and contributors. It has an active community, good feature support, and impressive benchmark scores. The framework Rocket is not far behind in terms of popularity; however, it uses Rust nightly to run, which is less stable. For the rest of the book, we will be building our to-do app in Actix. However, introductions to the Rocket and Warp web frameworks will be covered in their own chapters at the end of the book.

The power of Rust is that it enables users to rapidly develop with high-level, memory-safe structs with low memory consumption and fast execution times. However, it also allows fine-grain control if needed. If a developer really wants to, they can deactivate the memory safety in Rust and continue to develop and run Rust programs (though it is not recommended). Rust's crates are no exception to this...