Dioxus Fullstack in Production: Benefits and Challenges After One Year

Production Experience with Dioxus Fullstack

A developer has shared insights after a year of using Dioxus fullstack in production for micro SaaS products, including SeggWat and infra.page. The setup involves a Cargo workspace with a backend crate, an auth crate, and multiple UI crates, all built on Dioxus 0.7 and PostgreSQL. The 'fullstack' approach means a single Rust codebase handles server-side rendering, server functions, and client-side WebAssembly compilation.

Advantages of a Unified Rust Stack

The primary benefit identified is the use of a single language, Rust, across the entire stack, from database queries to UI components. This unification simplifies the development environment, toolchain, and debugging process. The developer notes that this reduces context switching, which is particularly valuable for solo founders managing multiple products.

Another significant advantage is the shared type system. Structs are defined once and used across the database layer, server functions, and UI components. This eliminates the need for regenerating OpenAPI specs or managing out-of-sync TypeScript interfaces, enabling safer and more confident refactoring.

Future-Proofing and Stability

The Dioxus framework's ability to target desktop and mobile platforms, including iOS, from the same component model is seen as a long-term benefit, offering flexibility for future product expansion without rewrites. In production, the Rust codebase is described as 'boring' because once compiled, it runs reliably, reducing a class of runtime errors and allowing focus on logic bugs.

Challenges: CI Build Times

Despite the benefits, the most significant pain point highlighted is the continuous integration (CI) process. A release build on a GitHub-hosted runner takes 90 minutes, which is a considerable time investment and a source of frustration.