How to Build a Web Scraper in Rust: Performance and Safety

While Python dominates web scraping, Rust offers compelling advantages: zero-cost abstractions, memory safety, and raw performance. Here's how to build a production-grade scraper in Rust. Why Rust for Web Scraping? 10-100x faster than Python for CPU-bound parsing Memory safe without garbage collection Concurrent by design with async/await and Tokio Single binary deployment — no dependency hell Low memory footprint — crucial for large-scale scraping Setting Up cargo new web_scraper && cd web_scraper Add to Cargo.toml : [dependencies] reqwest = { version = "0.12" , features = [ "json" ] } tokio = { version = "1" , features = [ "full" ] } scraper = "0.20" serde = { version = "1" , features = [ "derive" ] } serde_json = "1" csv = "1.3" Basic HTTP Scraper use reqwest :: Client ; use scraper ::{ Html , Selector }; use serde :: Serialize ; use std :: error :: Error ; #[derive(Debug, Serialize)] struct Article { title : String , url : String , points : u32 , } async fn scrape_hn ( client : & C