What Switching From C# to Rust Actually Taught Me

Short summary

A developer shares lessons from rewriting a real-time order tracking service from C# (ASP.NET Core) to Rust (axum/tokio). Rust forced explicit handling of shared state, errors, and nulls, improving the author's mental model of concurrency. Benchmarks show Rust with ~9MB idle memory vs ~110MB for C#, ~6ms p99 vs ~42ms, though .NET narrows the gap once JIT warms up. Author recommends C# for typical CRUD apps and Rust for latency-critical or memory-constrained workloads.

• •Rust's borrow checker forces explicit concurrency modeling, improving understanding of shared state
• •Rust showed ~12x lower memory and ~7x better p99 latency vs C# in a real-time service benchmark
• •C# remains preferable for CRUD apps; Rust suits latency-sensitive or memory-constrained workloads

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