If you like PHP so much, why is this website in Rust?

Natty, you claim to really enjoy writing PHP, yet you never really use it in projects. Why?

Short answer, I don't trust myself enough not to fuck up.

Long answer, we've spent years writing websites, and every time we revisit some project, we immediately find dangerous bugs.

First, we're gonna only gloss over how archaic package management in PHP feels. When we see a curl|bashed script supposedly installing a module pull up the C compiler, our first instinct is to run. What the hell is Zend doing?

The anxiety of having a high-attack-surface application open to the wide internet drives us to write software where we expose as little "live wires" as possible. Rust allows us to take high-quality off-the-shelf components, and the type system prevents us from touching something we shouldn't.

It's not necessarily about the number of features the software has, rather the public contract the component has to uphold. When we write software in a dynamic language (including PHP), we have to be well-versed in every way the rules can be bent to break something. Tools like Ajv in the JavaScript world and similar help alleviate this issue a bit, but at that point, why not go with something that has static guarantees by default?

I love dynamic languages in many instances, I just wish they didn't force me to give up so much.