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Comment by ctxc | Hacker News Reader

This is akin to saying if you rewrite it in Assembly it would be better than Rust. True, but what are the tradeoffs? Why doesn't everyone write it in assembly?

It _would_ be bigger and eat more RAM and CPU. But that does not imply "shittier".

There are parameters like dev time, skills available in the market, familiarity, the JS ecosystem etc that sometimes outweigh the disadvantage of being bigger/slower.

You're pointing out the disadvantages in isolation which is not a balanced take.

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All those parameters mentioned are exclusively for developers. End users don't care and will get a worse product when you choose Electron instead of doing it properly.

End users care that they get a product at all. Which they won't if it's too costly to make. There is a balance that is appropriate for each project. Or else we should all be writing machine code by hand.

Rust has been shown by Google to not be any less productive than other mainstream languages though.

Link? I’d love to learn more!

[citation_needed]

> All those parameters mentioned are exclusively for developers. End users don't care and will get a worse product when you choose Electron instead of doing it properly.

A sensible take wouldn't pick one or the other as unilaterally better regarding the abstract context of what a good product is. The web as a platform is categorically amazing for building UIs, and if you chose continued to choose it as the frontend for a much more measurably performant search backend, that could be a fantastic product choice, as long as you do both parts right.

> This is akin to saying if you rewrite it in Assembly it would be better than Rust

Not really. Nobody is rewriting GUI apps in Assembly, the reasons are obvious.

Dev time like cater for ever moving Node stack? (Not sure if it applies here because I'm not familiar with Tauri).

This is something I think a lot of people miss about Rust - outside of slow compile times and personal preference, there is no reason not to choose Rust over JavaScript/TypeScript (unless of course you're working in the browser). It does everything JavaScript can do, but it does it faster and with more stability. At the end of the day, these features pay out huge dividends.

And this isn't Rust zealotry! I think this goes for any memory-safe AoT language that has a good ecosystem (e.g. Go or C#): why use JavaScript when other languages do it better?

Rust's type system gymnastics compared to most languages goes quite a bit beyond preference. I can't see the overlap at all with dynamic scripting languages, two completely different tools for completely different problems.

TS has one of the more gymnastics-heavy type systems, IMO, and I think many if not most JS shops use TS.

TS is gradual though, Rust is all or nothing.

A world of difference between the borrow checker and a garbage collector.

> there is no reason not to choose Rust

Sounds like Rust zealotry to me, followed by a mild attempt to walk it back.

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