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Comment by PoignardAzur | Hacker News Reader

Building things in Rust is its own reward!

More seriously though, that's a fair question. Anything that isn't the web has a lot of catching up to do before it can compare to the web.

(Though browsers are increasingly relying on rust frameworks for low-level work, so there's some potential for code reuse.)

My gut feeling answer would be "because things built for the web have a tendency to fail for no reason, and things built in Rust have a tendency to work on the first try". I'd have a hard time backing up that gut feeling with hard numbers, but I think it's a shared one. Web techs tend to have all sort of legacy cruft and small papercuts and stuff. Mature Rust crates are easy to install, work immediately and have an intuitive API. My hope is to get to a point where developing Rust GUI is just easy, no papercuts.

(But again, lots of catching up to do first.)

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how do things on the web fail for no reason? My experience is the exact opposite. The web's html is very lenient and if you html makes somewhat sense it will render your document.

If you're comparing legacy web code to new and modern rust crates of course it's not a fair comparison. just wait until the until the second wave of rust gui libs, it will be a similar pain of legacy code when the web industry went from Angular v1 to React. Legacy projects, outdated packages and brittle build processes, now with rust there will also be the added "benefit" of a more complicated programming language.

Did you never see that infamous "undefined is not a function" error message?

Of course I've seen it. have you ever seen the `Syntax Error: expected SEMICOLON` error message while trying to do something completely unrelated?

> Building things in Rust is its own reward!

Stop saying stuff like this. It's not true and it pushes people away bc you look fanatic

No, seriously, if I’m going to build something, then in general (not in all domains, but in most) I find it far more relaxing in Rust than in any other language I know. (I am biased by almost a decade of Rust being my preferred language, but I’ve continued to use JavaScript more often than Rust, with a fair bit of Python from time to time and a smattering of other languages; so Rust is hardly the only thing I work in.) It’s got comfortable and roughly-universally-accepted base tooling so that I’ll waste less time on scaffolding and initial decision-making than is the case in most (though certainly not all) languages, and then it’s just a whole lot more robust to develop in, with an excellent type system and semantics that removes many of the pain points in most other vaguely-similar (say, C-family) languages. Maintenance especially is delightful, particularly if you’re comparing it with web tech (which is the specific comparison being made).

It’s not all sunshine and roses, and the lack of things like browsers’ dev tools can certainly be painful, but Rust honestly is good enough to warrant serious consideration even in spaces where these difficulties apply.

PoignardAzur was speaking lightheartedly, but I honestly don’t think it’s an unreasonable general sentiment.

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