"took us 15 years of being flamed every time you pointed out you didn't like Javascript"
Rust is a special case here, light weight, and loved by JS devs.
I'd still "flame" anyone who wants to drop a C# or Java VM on their users.
Rust is a special case here, light weight, and loved by JS devs.
I'd still "flame" anyone who wants to drop a C# or Java VM on their users.
Is it? That's interesting, because to me the two languages seem to be polar opposites.
I just remember having to do a lot of my college classes in C++, where some of our basic programs needed variables to be constantly cast into another type just to do something with it. I remember, man, I cannot wait to have to deal with this when I parse json data from an api request, bring it on.
I am JS developer, and apparently I love Rust.
The onus is on you guys to tell me why I’d add cognitive overhead for simple webapps, and if it’s coming from the Rust community, I’m expecting to hear ‘performance’, in which case I’m game.
I have the same opinion on overheard in the JS churn cycle, it’s up to you to make the case why the overhead makes sense for the cruddiest of apps.
We shouldn’t coronate things willy nilly. If Rust is the one true blood prince of the C era, I expect him to reign in similar domains, but please don’t flex that power in domains where you are a sub standard solution.
All hail Rust, but jesus, slow down. That’s a simple js app.
Some people like Rust. Some people like web apps. Some people want to use Rust to write web apps. If you don't, there are tons of other technologies you can (and should!) use to do that, and someone saying "hey if you're interested, here's how with a small example" isn't a threat to any of that.
I no longer treat these posts as banal.
In what world is Rust a lower level language compared to JavaScript at this point?
The embedded one. Can't write bootloaders or kernels in JS. I mean, maybe you could but... why would you?
(On mobile here, bear with me if no newlines came through)
There is no axis on which JavaScript (with or without Typescript) is a higher-level language than Rust in 2020. Rust offers a richer standard library, much MUCH more powerful facilities for modeling data, state-of-the-art (de)serialization that's one crate import and a one-liner annotation away.
I don't know who came up with asm.js, but that person definitely knew. JavaScript's destiny is to be a building block. Yes, it feels nice to write plain JS without importing any libraries. It's nice knowing the difference between `Array#slice` and `Array#splice` without looking it up on MDN. But it felt just as nice for ASM coders in the 80s to bypass a C compiler, and look where we are now.
So you are missing a basic feature that a bazillion other languages can give you. I am still amazed how people think that the ML features in Rust somehow new inventions.
That seems like a much bigger minefield, but I’d be happy to be educated on this. I’d ask that part of that education include why I’d ever introduce this class of problems into web development.
Rust is the first mainstream language that looks at this code and says "Hold on, are you the only one modifying `a.name`?" And the intimidating part is not the question. The question is not for you. The intimidating part is that the Rust compiler asks itself the question, and it always knows the correct answer.
What the Rust compiler is looking at is the same thing the senior programmers are looking at during code reviews at your company. The people who know who should own which data. In C, once you `malloc` a struct someone has to know to `free` it. That's the rule. You acquire a resource? You're in charge of releasing it. Or at least passing the responsibility of freeing it over to someone else.
Rustc is the ultimate code reviewer. Yes, it's super pedantic, but also, hey, it can take any amount of insults you can throw at it and still thrive. If you run out of things to call it and the code still doesn't compile, guess what, the problem is probably on your side.
I repeat, Rustc is the perfect code reviewer you could ask for. And it's available 24/7. Compilation speeds are not very fast? Ok. Compare them to code review times from your peers when using a lesser language. 10 seconds for an incremental compile doesn't seem so bad when the alternative is to get instant feedback and a comment 16 hours later that you missed an edge case.
Sorry for the big post. Thanks if you read the whole thing; kudos if you scrolled straight down. Be kind, work hard, and good things will happen.
You’ll get all that (and more), and it’ll be higher level.
Additionally, these languages are designed to target the web, so they have a lot of libraries and bindings for JS libraries already written.
Redex's library selection is anemic compared to Crates.io, and so is Pursuit's. There are a couple of gems in both, but for any given use case it's just as likely you will have to write your own code than find a workable solution in the package manager.
More importantly, Rust has orders of magnitude higher bus factor than Purescript and ReasonML combined. Phil Freeman has long since left his project, and so will eventually Hongbo Zhang, at which point Reason will follow PS's slow downward spiral into open source limbo.
Believe it or not, I actually put a bit of thought into this. And I do firmly believe that Rust is by far the best ML-like language for the web available to the public right now. Perhaps I should finally write that blog post I keep putting off.
And considering TypeScript is so favored as a way to "herd the cats" of JavaScript typing, it seems not everybody shares your opinion.
People go to Rust not necessarily because it's "fast" or "low-level", but possibly because it has a expressive type system that lets you be precise and correct without having to be verbose.
Sure, the fact that it can be used at the low-level and for performance-intensive applications can be a very good thing, but it is far from Rust's only merit.
"loved by JS devs" is maybe a bit strong, as there are a LOT of JS devs, but we do enjoy a lot of JavaScript folks getting involved with and/or using Rust, and I and others have given a bunch of talks about Rust (with and without wasm) at JavaScript conferences that were well received.
Static checking etc. is nice but what's wrong with things like typescript? Do we really want web libraries fragmented into a million languages?
> randomly from the norm for no apparent reason other than to be different
This has been written about in a number of places, and I don't have time to get into it, but a lot of languages are trending in this direction with syntax because it is more regular in a language that contains pervasive type inference. It's not random.
> Static checking etc. is nice but what's wrong with things like typescript?
Typescript still has node (or deno, still V8) as a runtime, so you're still dealing with its runtime, and all the cons (and pros) there. Additionally, the guarantees you get out of TS and Rust are different, as they have pretty different type systems, even if they're both statically typed, and TS is closer to Rust than it is to JS.
- leaning on (some) pragmatic FP concepts
- modern tooling and dependency management
- very _approachable_ and solid documentation, books etc. (see MDN, Rust by Example, Rust Book, Eloquent Javascript...)
- both can target the browser (well)
- Mozilla has a very good name in the Web dev community. I think at least; this is definitely relevant to me.
I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but JS/TS is WAY more human readable than Rust is. It's almost the equivalent of programming in C for the browser. Plus, literally anything you could ever want to use in already in the JS ecosystem and doesn't have to be reinvented in Rust.
Also, explicitly borrowing in method signatures is a BIG plus for me as its a lot easier to understand an API when its clear whether it mutates or not an argument, as opposed to JS where number arguments just cannot be mutated and pointer arguments (such as arrays) always can be mutated. I find understanding random github projects a lot easier in rust than js or python.
I'm not saying you should use rust, but many like rust specifically because of its readability and even find they're more productive in the long term because of its "high level" features and explicitness (although LEARNING it is a lot harder).
...so but how's the quality of npm ecoshitstem? last time I heard you guys had some trouble in paradise, plus everything noteworthy is owned by either facebook or google, both having huge antitrust issues lately
Rust certainly has an advantage here, as it was design to not require a runtime system.
Tiny Go, D and AssemblyScript all manage small enough download sizes.
Then just like with native apps, one doesn't necessarily need to download everything at once.
Is there any data on that?