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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised by this:

"Rust has quickly become the best language for integrating with existing web applications."

Is that really true or some PR hyperbole?

In terms of web-assembly, Rust really is the "market leader". C/C++ come with a lot of baggage, and the distinct disadvantage of not having a package manager, and everything else has more work to do due to having to implement a GC. Additionally, Rust has made wasm a focus, and now has bindings to most of the web APIs. And even high-level libraries that generate DOM.

For doing anything with WASM, Rust is (as of this moment) far and away the best experience. The Rust devs have had their eye on WASM support since long before WASM stabilized, giving them a first-mover advantage, and they benefit from the fact that Rust's model is so C-like that it's relatively little work to make it work with what WASM expects.

>"Rust has quickly become the best language for integrating with existing web applications."

In what senses? Interested to know, being both a CLI and a web dev guy, and not having looked much into either Rust or wasm yet (read a little of the Rust book, only, recently).

We’re seeing two ways so far: the first is WebAssembly. Our tooling does not assume that you’re re-writing everything in wasm, but that you’re using it alongside JS, so you can use it only where it makes sense, and it’s easy to do so.

Second, in services. Microservice architecture means you can write parts of your applications in different languages, and we have really nice JSON handling, or whatever other format you’re using. People have moved high load services to rust and seen big gains.

Of course, there’s still lots of work to do, and there’s always compelling reasons to use other technologies too.

Thanks for the detailed and balanced answer.

>we have really nice JSON handling, or whatever other format you’re using.

Good to know. Data formats and conversion between them (often, though not solely, in the context of CLI apps) is one of my interests and areas of experience, so will check out those aspects of Rust over time.

>People have moved high load services to rust and seen big gains.

Cool ...

Check out Serde. https://serde.rs/#data-formats

Lots of things are using it as well https://crates.io/crates/serde/reverse_dependencies

Thanks, I will.

Serde - good product name :)

I think it means specifically for compile-to-WASM languages. In that sense it's probably true, certainly the tooling is better than any I've seen elsewhere.

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