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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

The code is terse right now, but all of the ideas are there.

In two years, I fully expect Rust to begin taking off as a major frontend language choice. A framework like Seed will help usher this in.

It'll be faster than Javascript, eventually multithreaded, and produce portable binaries that can run on a wide variety of platforms and architectures.

It'll paint to DOM, but also do immediate mode and other types of rendering.

We'll see incredibly rich applications: games, video editors, IDEs, etc.

Electron will yield to this. We'll have fast, cross-platform apps that run not just on the browser, but natively on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

If we're lucky, we might even start writing mobile apps this way and ditch the iPhone/Android specific APIs.

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I love your optimism but I think you're overlooking a lot of why we've ended up in the landscape we are now, and it's not because we lacked a well designed language. It's because Javascript is like PHP: easy to learn, quick to develop in, cheap to hire, and just about good enough for people to stick with it.

Don't get me wrong, I hate Javascript as a language. But sometimes worse is better.

[edited to make my point clearer] This is not about "value" of the language (worse is better) it is just about cost (cheap is better). Hiring js dev is cheaper because it is cheaper/faster to learn js.

You're just reiterating the same points I made :)

edited to try to clarify my point. Mostly reacting to your last sentence.

I'd already said JS was quicker to learn and cheaper to hire though. The "worse is better" statement is just a phrase intended to succinctly summarise that point:

> It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability. Software that is limited, but simple to use, may be more appealing to the user and market than the reverse.

( Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better )

JS is simpler and cheaper thus preferable.

I guess I took for granted that not everyone is familiar with that phrase, sorry

I don't think this will happen, I don't even think Rust will become 1/10th the frontend language you're predicting it will.

There is not a single chance that a language like C++ or Rust become mainstream in frontend dev. The complexity of the language is at the opposite side of what webdev is about.

> The complexity of the language is at the opposite side of what webdev is about.

That's not true, current JS is getting complex, but we don't have a choice, except for WASM but the options aren't great. TypeScript is also very complex, but it's the most popular so people use it. Basic Rust isn't that complex, and I would argue is easier than TypeScript. I wouldn't want to be the guy building the framework, but using Rust to write business logic? That might be nice.

On the backend side, Java dominates, with PHP, JS/TS, Python. All of these (in their modern form) are complex, usually by way of OO soup, or big frameworks, or a large ecosystem that you have to learn at first. On the other hand, languages that people like calling "simple" like Go or Clojure are relatively nice (at least for "business logic" web apps, Go is popular for "infra/devops" web stuff").

This is not a fever dream in my opinion, just replace Rust with your favorite language if that language targets WASM. Eventually, JS will be just another choice in a field of languages that would target WASM... then it is just a matter of preference.

People have been saying this for years. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Why not? WASM is gaining features after it's MVP, such as GC support, direct targeting with DOM APIs (with reference types and interface types), it's not a fast process, but it's coming. It doesn't take anything away from any programming language, but it provides a more efficient platform for those languages to run... what is there not to like?

Lots of languages target JavaScript too, but only one got very popular, because ecosystem matters a lot. People are going to have to recreate the current JavaScript ecosystem for each languages, and then probably for each framework in that language.

I have no idea who you are or how closely have you been following the ecosystem of languages, but like what? What you just said is what languages do

No, not really. The only language that has mindshare in the frontend outside of JavaScript is TypeScript. Elm, CoffeeScript, Rescript and all of these are not known at all. In the JS ecosystem, Angular, React and Vue are king, but React is really fragmented with all the options (Next, etc). All of this because JavaScript is the most popular language in the world. Most other languages won't get that mindshare.

Elm doesn't have the JS ecosystem, Rust doesn't, Rescript doesn't. The thing is, when you're doing backend stuff, it's usually relatively easy to pull a library with whatever framework you're using. On the frontend, for your components, you need basically a library by framework by language.

> Why not?

Not enough people care enough to make it happen. I think most people underestimate the breadth of the work that would have to be done. The people in the best position do do it (the browser vendors) aren’t willing to do that.

Wasn't this the promise of Java? I like your optimism though.

I can’t see how when Java predates JavaScript.

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