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vmspon Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust

This is the kind of thing I would have found amazing a year ago — maybe even less — but now I can't help but wonder "What for?"

A coding agent already knows how to generate whatever it needs on the backend plus the client-side pieces. What's the point in having a Rust subset that compiles down to JS when I can just not have it and the result be the same?

I feel like the question these days is to figure out the right level of abstraction and Topcoat might be too much.

PS: This isn't a jab at the library or its authors. It's just me trying to figure out what still matters in the age of LLMs.

vmspon Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]

Whatever answer you get, it's nothing more than an opinion. For now, anyway.

https://danluu.com/pl-tokens/

vmspon WalShadow: Sub-second Postgres replication to ClickHouse from physical WAL

They're not using `wal_level = logical`, which has been the "friendly" way of doing CDC on Postgres since ever, but are going straight to `wal_level = replica` which, afaik, has never really been used to build something atop of except Postgres' own replication.

This is very interesting. I'd never have guessed that it'd make such a difference. I also bet this is the sort of thing that would have never end up being implemented without access to coding agents. Having to figure out these protocol-level details is no longer the huge time sink it was

vmspon Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

I've been building a framework for web, ios and android native development at https://github.com/vmsp/flypath.

It's based on the Server-Driven UI philosophy where the backend streams both code and UI into a frontend that just knows how to render what it's told. This is pretty cool because it makes it makes over-the-air updates possible.

It also follows the batteries-included philosophy of Rails. Has an ORM, background and cron jobs (all based on Postgres), Django-style migrations, JSX Emails and pretty great FFI that's built around a simple `"use native"` directive, in the React Server Component fashion).

vmspon Shopify moves back to Native from React Native

I came here to say this. I also prefer fully native apps but this is the elephant in the room. If most of your web code can be re-used on native, that's a ton of tokens you won't have to pay for.

vmspon Vidact – a compiler that turns React into direct DOM operations

I was about to comment this. The selling for svelte has always been that the compiler will output just the needed instructions for the expressed transformation. No virtual DOM.

vmspon The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

OXC Transformers are amazingly faster than Babel. I'm building a framework (https://github.com/vmsp/flypath) for web, iOS and Android native development that's fully backed by OXC and Vite. Instead of transforming styles using Babel like StyleX, I just use OXC. Instead of Metro (React Native's bundler), which also uses Babel, it's just Vite. It's still very early but it's plenty, plenty fast.

vmspon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2026)

  Location: Portugal
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Ruby, TypeScript, Python, Go, Rails, Django, Postgres, React, React Native, Node, Next.js, Postgres, Redis
  Résumé/CV: https://0x1.pt/Vitor_Sousa_Pereira_CV.pdf
  Email: vmsousapereira@gmail.com

I was previously founding and lead engineer at a London-based startup in talent-tech that got acquired last year. Then I tried to do my own thing (https://hanlec.com/) and failed at that. Now looking for my next role.

In my free time, I work on https://github.com/vmsp/flypath. A framework for web, android and iOS native apps using Server-Driven UI.

vmspon Show HN: Nub – A Bun-like all-in-one toolkit for Node.js

Hasn't Node been able to run TypeScript for a couple of versions? Why's the transpiler needed?

vmspon The new bibliomaniacs

I didn't know I was part of a trend, that's pretty cool. I've been buying originals related to the Portuguese Estado Novo and Carnation Revolution for some years. A ton of ad-hoc, clearly political, publishers spawned right after the revolution and I've been thinking of digitizing some of the stuff I have for historical purposes.

vmspon The Problem with the Ferrari Luce EV Offers a Lesson for Every Leader

With the kind of press it’s getting, I bet this model will outsell all others made in the last 10y. I don’t remember the last time a Ferrari was on the news.

vmspon Launch HN: Superset (YC P26) – IDE for the agents era

Is anyone actually using agent swarms for anything real?

vmspon Deno 2.8

That wasn't a value judgment on the acquisition. I was just pointing out that it made the project more sustainable.

vmspon Deno 2.8

I wonder how Deno's faring.

Node's the stable solution and will be with us forever. You can now use TypeScript with it and, soon enough, you'll be able to build your app to a single executable -- including native deps.

Bun's chaotic but, nonetheless, it's _fast_ and it's taking an interesting approach by including everything in the stdlib. Plus, bought by Anthropic.

Deno had an awesome story with the sandbox and ease of import for third-party dependencies. Sandboxes feel pretty commoditized now and I'm not sure the import mechanism ended up being that much nicer than a `npm add`.

vmspon The Interview That Ships to Production: replacing whiteboards with pull requests

Everyone prefers real problems. It's something you already know how to do instead of something you explicitly have to train for.

It doesn't change the fact that the real work could be an hour's exercise or longer remunerated work. This isn't an either/or scenario like you put it. Plus, for a fact, companies will happily have you doing both the leetcode and the take-home test.

vmspon The Interview That Ships to Production: replacing whiteboards with pull requests

Some companies do this and pay the candidate for their time, regardless of outcome. I don't think there's much to comment there. Some don't pay the candidate. In that case, it's just a predatory practice to take advantage of the tough job market.

vmspon Nim-Presto – REST API Framework for Nim Language (2024)

It's cool to see Nim in the wild, you don't hear about it often

vmspon Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and a cron scheduler – inside your SQLite file

Reminds me of Litestack for Rails. Eventually, it was abandoned because Rails itself started going all out on SQLite.

https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack

vmspon Nanopass Framework: Clean Compiler Creation Language

Wouldn't this kind of architecture yield a slower compiler, regardless of output quality? Conceptually, trying to implement the least-amount of passes with each doing as much work as possible would make more sense to me.

vmspon Building a framework-agnostic Ruby gem (and making sure it doesn't break)

Interesting lib. Sort of like Hotwire Native

https://native.hotwired.dev/

vmspon Switzerland hosts 'CERN of semiconductor research'

How does one learn about designing chips, ISAs and the manufacturing process? I feel like it’s hard info to got or, at least, to know how to get started.

Terrific initiative, either way. Open-source chips must be the way.

vmspon Swift 6.3

True. Google was even thinking of switching TensorFlow from Python to Swift.

https://github.com/tensorflow/swift

vmspon Iran war energy crisis is a renewable energy wake-up call

As a Portuguese I have a more nuanced view of these type of takes.

We invested _heavily_ and prematurely in renewable energies -- see my comment from a couple of years ago [0]. Since then, our energy prices were high for a while and now they're not much lower than the EU's average because all that investment needs to be amortized [1]. Two years ago, we ran a whole month on renewables [2]. Despite this, our increase in energy prices since the Iran war started has been dramatic and the price of everything has been going up significantly. I can't help but think about the ROI on all those renewables if they can't help make our lives easier at a time like this. I'd much rather we go nuclear.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37719568

[1]: https://eco.sapo.pt/2026/03/11/precos-da-eletricidade-e-gas-...

[2]: https://www.portugalglobal.pt/en/news/2024/april/renewable-e...

vmspon We rewrote our Rust WASM parser in TypeScript and it got faster

Not directly related to the post but what does OpenUI do? I'm finding it interesting but hard to understand. Is it an intermediate layer that makes LLMs generate better UI?

vmspon Show HN: Elysia JIT "Compiler", why it's one of the fastest JavaScript framework

Is doing stuff like constant folding pre-execution really worth it? I mean, won't the engine itself (V8, JSC, MozJS) be doing it anyway? I know that Google's Closure Compiler — probably still the most advanced JS optimized — also does it but I can't help but think it's probably pointless.

vmspon CG/SQL – SQL dialect compiler to C for sqlite3 mimicking stored procedures

I'm guessing this is a fork of Facebook's abandoned library? https://github.com/facebookincubator/CG-SQL

vmspon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://0x1.pt/

I like to keep it simple.

vmspon Valdi – A cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance

Snapchat also maintains Djinni, used to generate type-safe bindings for C++ code. With Valdi, it seems like they chose to go another route.

https://github.com/Snapchat/djinni

vmspon Valdi – A cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance

That's perfectly reasonable but, at that point, the argument becomes: build 95% natively and maybe there's a 5% "core" that warrants extracting into a common lib. Technically? That's excellent architecture. In terms of saving development time — which is where stuff like React Native comes in? Not so much.

vmspon Valdi – A cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance

I hear this and it makes sense but when I actually go about implementing it, it quickly falls apart.

Most apps are UI, remote requests and maybe some storage. What do you put in the common core? Android does HTTP requests one way. iOS does them another way. You go for the lowest common denominator an implement a third way, using libcurl or something?

Or do you just put business logic in the common core? Is there really that much business logic that doesn't issue requests or access a database?