Rustra — Rust + Wasm Web Framework

Overview

Rustra is a multi-threaded web framework written from scratch in Rust, with a Wasm surface for running Rust in the browser. Built as a learning project to understand the pieces that higher-level frameworks (Actix, Axum, Rocket) abstract away.

Source: github.com/5uf/rustra

Why Build Another Framework

• Using a framework ≠ understanding it. I wanted hands-on experience with TCP listeners, request parsing, thread pools, and worker scheduling at the code level.
• Wasm is a credible deployment target for performance-critical browser code; wiring it up end-to-end surfaces the rough edges.

What’s Inside

Server

• Custom TCP listener accepting HTTP requests.
• Hand-rolled request/response parsing — no hyper, no tokio abstractions to hide behind.
• Thread-pool model: a pool of worker threads pulls jobs off a shared channel so the accept loop stays non-blocking.

WebAssembly

• Rust modules compiled to Wasm to run the same logic in the browser.
• Exercised the wasm-bindgen / wasm-pack toolchain for JS interop.

What It Demonstrates

• Low-level Rust: ownership, Send/Sync, channels, and thread-safe shared state.
• Systems thinking: how a web server actually accepts, parses, dispatches, and responds to a request.
• Willingness to go a layer deeper than the docs.

Status

Personal project. Not production-grade — real deployments should use a battle-tested framework — but the exercise of building it was the point.