Historically associated with systems programming due to its roots in Mozilla, Rust’s promise of safety, speed, and concurrency has led to its widespread adoption at the infrastructure level. This rise to prominence raises an intriguing question: Does Rust have a place higher up the stack, an area traditionally dominated by dynamic languages? Conventional wisdom suggests that these upper-tier domains prioritize productivity over raw performance. However, this talk will challenge this notion and explore Rust’s potential benefits to application backend development.