I also want to be able to run it on a cheap FPGA, something like Artix A7.

I actually love it. The more work I can offload to compiler the better. One simple example that frustrated me in Go was adding a field to a struct. You add the field the the whole thing still compiles even though the zero-initialized value probably broke your app logic. In Rust if I add a field to a struct, the compiler warns me about all the places that I need to double check.

> Would you mind sharing some of your experiences?

I highly recommend zero2prod book which is well-written, practical, but still teaches the essential principles (https://www.zero2prod.com/). You basically deploy a CRUD app to DigitalOcean from scratch. The best way to ramp up IMHO.

> How do you find the tooling?

Cargo is sweet. rust-analyzer is all I need. I need less extraneous tooling to be effective. For example, in Go I might use a task runner to watch the repo and run tests when I change a file. But in Rust I can just follow the rust-analyzer highlights and manually compile less-frequently.

> Also, I've considered Diesel for ORM, so was wondering if you've been using that too.

I was not happy with GORM (https://gorm.io/index.html) and never had a satisfactory experience with any ORM. I'm a fan of writing plain SQL, even in Go. It's just that with Rust sqlx I can get compile-time checks against the schema. It's not anything new (see Haskell), but it tightens the feedback loop and I have full control of the performance.

1. Much more expressive type system: no more `interface{}`.

2. Algebraic data type with `enum`. Exhaustive check.

3. `serde` crate is lightyears ahead of Go's `json:"wtf"`.

4. Compile-time checks against DB with `sqlx` crate.

5. Logging is a breeze with `tracing::instrument`.

6. Using macros to reduce boilerplate has better UX than Go codegen.

What these give me is more confidence in development/refactoring because the compiler can guide me most of the way.

Low lights:

1. Build time.

2. Async is still clunky. e.g. Try to implement an `actix-web` extractor or middleware.

3. Please just stablize nightly rustfmt features already.