Comment by octopoc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by octopoc | Hacker News Reader

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This is a good summary of the problem with rust I think:

> Pretty much all UI can be modeled as a tree–or more abstractly as a graph. A tree is a natural way to model UI: it makes it easy to compose different components together to build something that is visually complicated. It’s also been one of most common ways to model UI programming since at least the existence of HTML, if not earlier.

> UI in Rust is difficult because it's hard to share data across this component tree without inheritance. Additionally, in a normal UI framework there are all sorts of spots where you need to mutate the element tree, but because of Rust’s mutability rules, this "alter the tree however you want" approach doesn't work.[1]

[1] https://www.warp.dev/blog/why-is-building-a-ui-in-rust-so-ha...

If I’m being charitable that is an oversimplification, and I suppose I should be charitable at Christmas. But the Scrooge in me is screaming that this analysis is deeply flawed.

Rust makes ownership and mutability explicit. Concurrent editing is very dangerous no matter what stack you are using. Rust just doesn’t let you get away with being a cowboy and choosing YOLO as your concurrency model.

Shared mutable state isn’t any harder in Rust than other languages. In fact, writing correct, bug-free and performant code is easier in Rust than almost any other language in common use, because the tooling is there. It’s just that the other compilers let you ship buggy code without complaining.

To the specific example, there are ways of sharing mutable state, or encapsulating changes throughout a UI tree. I’ve written a UI framework in Rust that does this. It is difficult to get right. But this is true of ANY language - the difficulty is intrinsic to the data type, if you actually care about doing it correctly.

That difficulty does not need to be exposed to the user. There are plenty of Rust UI libraries that take react-like lambda updaters, for example.

I still fail to see the connection to garbage collectors.

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