Rust vs. Python for Web Infrastructure: What We Chose and Why

The Rust-vs-Python debate is exhausting. Both are excellent. The right choice depends on what you're building, who is building it, and how fast you need to ship.

What We Build

At Graham Miranda UG, our stack has three parts:

Query dispatcher (Python/FastAPI) — Dispatches searches to 8-12 sources

Result ranker (Python) — Normalizes and scores cross-source results

Frontend (Next.js/TypeScript) — SSR, minimal client-side JS

Why Python Won

Developer Velocity

Our team knows Python. Moving to Rust would mean 3-6 months of learning before productive work. In a startup, that's death.

Ecosystem Maturity

Python's web ecosystem is unmatched:

FastAPI: async, typed, OpenAPI-native

Celery: battle-tested distributed tasks

BeautifulSoup + lxml: 20 years of HTML parsing refinement

Playwright: best-in-class browser automation

Async Performance

Python 3.11+ async is fast enough for our workload. 3,000 queries/day on a single VPS.…