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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Another rewrite in Rust.

What about finally stop using node.js for server side development?

This is for tooling.

Node.js has been extraordinarily useful for building build tools. We're outgrowing it's capacity and rightfully moving to a compiled language. Also faster tooling is essential for establishing a high quality feedback loop for AI agents

Why go halfway, embrace compiled languages in the backend.

Fast all the way down, especially when coupled with REPL tooling.

Because writing Rust backend is needlessly complex for majority of projects.

I've had a great time using Rust with Actix as the framework.

Still easier than dealing with node dependencies, webpack and co, they make me wish to write ASP with OCX components instead.

Your complaint is with Vite – famously incredibly simple and reliable to work with – using Rust, but you're bringing up webpack's complexity?

Node dependencies are fine, add an npmrc file to have it default to exact versioning and you solve 90% of common day to day problems. It's not ideal, but nor is cargo's mystery meat approach to importing optional features from packages.

My remark, and not complaint, is that the fashion to rewrite everything in Rust across the JavaScript ecosystem proves the point of holding it wrong.

Maybe leave JavaScript on the browser, where it belongs.

Rewriting build time tooling to Rust is leaving Javascript on the browser?

Somebody just really dislikes JS. I sympathize. I wouldn't (be able to) write backend in Rust though.

Why stop at tbe build tools, take JS ecosystem out of the backend.

There’s a middle ground between node and rust. Dotnet and Java are wildly productive places to work but they’re not as exciting as rust.

Also, writing JavaScript for the backend is needlessly underperforming for anything with any load.

It takes tooling team and discipline to keep compile times at bay when you reach mid size projects with compiled languages (looking at you Java, C++, Rust).

Lack of discipline is exactly the magic word regardig the node ecosystem mess.

Maybe? The point still stands that majority of programmers/industry is not equipped to deal with this adequately.

But, it doesn’t need to be so. Go is pretty fast to compile. So is Jai, from what I’ve seen. So was TurboPascal. Rust has a similar problem to the one Vite has been solving- Rust (and most languages) weren’t designed for compilation speed, and it’s hard to retroactively fix that. But, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a bunch of statically typed, fast-to-compile languages.

I agree with your remark, only that Rust's current problem is tooling, not the language itself.

See OCaml or Haskell, they also have interpreters and REPLs as part of their tooling.

Also there should be no need to always compile crates from scratch when starting a new project.

Which ironically circles back to your remark of having a similar problem.

I’m with you. It’s very telling when all of the tools are being rewritten and seeing orders of magnitudes of speed ups.

It just shows that people don’t value the actual performance of what they’re running.

Node as a compiler runtime or node as a runtime runtime?

Anything backend related.

isnt that what projects like bun are aiming to do?

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