Porting the C# clippy app to Rust

Last week, I wrote a little hello world app that responds to HTTP requests with a clippy ASCII art. But the docker image for the app was 111MB in size.

So today, I decided to port the app to rust.

If you only want to see the code, here you go. Here’s the PR.

It took me 3 hours to port the app, whereas writing the C# app had barely taken me 5 minutes. I ended up spending most of the time trying to decide which web-framework to use, and the rest of the time trying to put together a Dockerfile.

The rust code in itself was straightforward. I chose to use a web-framework called axum, and they already have a huge list of examples in their GitHub repository.

Here’s my rust code:

 1use axum::{response::Result, Router};
 2use std::net::SocketAddr;
 3use std::env;
 4
 5const CLIPPY:&str = r#"
 6
 7         __
 8        /  \        _____________
 9        |  |       /             \
10        @  @       | It looks    |
11        || ||      | like you    |
12        || ||    Result {
13    Ok(CLIPPY)
14}
15
16fn get_port() -> u16 {
17    env::var(PORT_ENV_VAR)
18        .unwrap_or("NOT_SET".to_string())
19        .parse::()
20        .unwrap_or(3000)
21}

It’s not very different from C# if you think about it. It’s almost as if C++ and C# had a baby.

Since the goal of the rewrite was to reduce the docker image size, here are some size stats: Final ImageLanguageSizeubuntu:lunarC#160MBubuntu/dotnet-deps:7.0_edgeC#111MBalpine:latestRust13.1MBscratchRust6MB Mission accomplished.