6 ms·

What's the relevance of learning Rust for someone into web development?

by 2_listerine_pls 9y ago

mlevental 9y ago
rust compiles to web assembly
- stochastic_monk 9y ago
  What kinds of things could you do with web assembly that you can’t do in native JavaScript? I know very little about web development.
  - eggpy 9y ago
    You can run code written in a language you are comfortable with and run web code really, really fast. It's not an "either JS or WebAssembly", they can work together. Worth reading up on if you are interested - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly
  - wwweston 9y ago
    Mostly it lets you not use JavaScript, which you may or may not be excited about, depending on how much you think the problem with web development is JS.
    - ameliaquining 9y ago
      There are plenty of languages that compile to JavaScript. They don't save you from having to interface with the DOM and other JavaScript APIs, but neither does WebAssembly (which currently has no such capabilities at all, save through JavaScript FFI).
  - eat_veggies 9y ago
    It gets you very close to native performance while running in your browser and browser sandbox. That's mind-blowing. You'd still use JS for UI stuff, but WASM lets you run algorithmic or CPU intensive tasks like e.g. games, video decoding, image resizing, AI, or anything else you need fast performance for client-side.
    - FridgeSeal 9y ago
      There was a demo the other day of Rust outperforming JS for stuff JS usually does. Presumably this will continue to improve, so it won't even be a case of equivalent, it'll be a case of "thoroughly beats the pants off".
      - kqr 9y ago
        "Very close to native" means "much more efficient than JS", because JS is nowhere near native. (Have we really gone so far that people hear "native" and think of the browser? Like the web browser is the machine we target, and not the metal box the end user purchased?)
        stochastic_monk 9y ago
        Is it pretty easy to write C++ extensions to V8? I've seen a couple of projects of that sort. I wonder if they're relatively difficult, and if that's perhaps why the push for WebAssembly has been so strong.
  - xiphias 9y ago
    The Unreal engine can be used innthe browsers quite effectively thanks to WebAssembly. It would be impossible to write a modern gam in JS
  - thegeekpirate 9y ago
    I know that the web wallet for NANO uses wasm to generate hashes, and is _much_ more performant than the JS equivalent.
OtterCoder 9y ago
As a web developer, you can write servers that take orders of magnitude less space, memory, and CPU than a similar JS server, without having to deal with the madness that is first-time C development.
- nobleach 9y ago
  Give me something that can run ReactDOM.renderToString() faster, and I'm all ears. Until that day (and I'm kinda hoping it comes) I'm a bit stuck.
  - v_lisivka 9y ago
    https://github.com/DenisKolodin/yew https://github.com/DenisKolodin/yew
    - nobleach 9y ago
      This does look interesting. I don't see a difference between this and any other server-side templating language though. I actually need an isomorphic representation on the client and server. (this is what makes renderToString() valuable) I guess I could be extremely careful in writing the server output, and writing the client output to match, but at that point, I'd be writing it twice... and I could use any language... unfortunately, it'd probably end up being Handlebars.
      - v_lisivka 9y ago
        It's for client side, not for server side. It's compiled into Wasm and delivered to client. You can use same code for server-side pre-rendering (for faster loading or for search engine indexing), but it is not main goal of Yew.
  - meritt 9y ago
    I'm not very familiar with the React ecosystem but I thought the entire point was letting the client-side handle rendering and passing structured data via API calls? renderToString() sounds like it's doing what every scripting language and templating framework has been doing for the past 20 years?
grayrest 9y ago
> What's the relevance of learning Rust for someone into web development? Rust is a language that cares a lot about correctness. If I were particularly interested in making sure the code I wrote worked in production, Rust would be my first choice in the set of a dozen languages I know. Rust is probably quite a bit faster than whatever you're using for web development. The normal counterpoint to this is that web requests tend to be rate limited by the database. This is mostly true but using Rust pretty much guarantees this will be the case. I believe that this point isn't that compelling with current architectures but would be worthwhile in a CQRS architecture where formatted data gets pushed/cached by the web servers and servicing requests stays on-machine. Rust is one of the more compelling web assembly languages due to not needing a garbage collector. Demos exist but this is mostly in the exploratory stages. Longer term, I expect Rust to have a unified async networking stack. You can do blocking IO networking in Rust but I expect most network clients/servers to be mostly async once the Tokio stack settles. This is all expected in node but the networking libraries tend to be fractured in most languages. I don't think you should run out and switch over to Rust for general web development. There's going to be a big release in the fall that rolls up a bunch of ergonomic/convenience stuff that should make it easier to pick up and less annoying to use. I also think that IDE support will be important for a lot of people learning Rust. The situation is improving but the support is not up to par compared to more mature languages. All told, it's serviceable but I don't expect it to be particularly compelling as a web development language for at least another year or two.
steveklabnik 9y ago
We have an entire working group dedicated to looking at the end-to-end web story this year, both backend and front end. Things are still a bit rough, but coming along nicely. The next release of Rust includes a major language feature that’s helpful when writing asynchronous code (impl Trait), for example.

What's the relevance of learning Rust for someone into web development?

mlevental 9y ago

rust compiles to web assembly

stochastic_monk 9y ago
What kinds of things could you do with web assembly that you can’t do in native JavaScript? I know very little about web development.
- eggpy 9y ago
  You can run code written in a language you are comfortable with and run web code really, really fast. It's not an "either JS or WebAssembly", they can work together. Worth reading up on if you are interested - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly
- wwweston 9y ago
  Mostly it lets you not use JavaScript, which you may or may not be excited about, depending on how much you think the problem with web development is JS.
  - ameliaquining 9y ago
    There are plenty of languages that compile to JavaScript. They don't save you from having to interface with the DOM and other JavaScript APIs, but neither does WebAssembly (which currently has no such capabilities at all, save through JavaScript FFI).
- eat_veggies 9y ago
  It gets you very close to native performance while running in your browser and browser sandbox. That's mind-blowing. You'd still use JS for UI stuff, but WASM lets you run algorithmic or CPU intensive tasks like e.g. games, video decoding, image resizing, AI, or anything else you need fast performance for client-side.
  - FridgeSeal 9y ago
    There was a demo the other day of Rust outperforming JS for stuff JS usually does. Presumably this will continue to improve, so it won't even be a case of equivalent, it'll be a case of "thoroughly beats the pants off".
    - kqr 9y ago
      "Very close to native" means "much more efficient than JS", because JS is nowhere near native. (Have we really gone so far that people hear "native" and think of the browser? Like the web browser is the machine we target, and not the metal box the end user purchased?)
      - stochastic_monk 9y ago
        Is it pretty easy to write C++ extensions to V8? I've seen a couple of projects of that sort. I wonder if they're relatively difficult, and if that's perhaps why the push for WebAssembly has been so strong.
- xiphias 9y ago
  The Unreal engine can be used innthe browsers quite effectively thanks to WebAssembly. It would be impossible to write a modern gam in JS
- thegeekpirate 9y ago
  I know that the web wallet for NANO uses wasm to generate hashes, and is _much_ more performant than the JS equivalent.

OtterCoder 9y ago

As a web developer, you can write servers that take orders of magnitude less space, memory, and CPU than a similar JS server, without having to deal with the madness that is first-time C development.

nobleach 9y ago
Give me something that can run ReactDOM.renderToString() faster, and I'm all ears. Until that day (and I'm kinda hoping it comes) I'm a bit stuck.
- v_lisivka 9y ago
  https://github.com/DenisKolodin/yew https://github.com/DenisKolodin/yew
  - nobleach 9y ago
    This does look interesting. I don't see a difference between this and any other server-side templating language though. I actually need an isomorphic representation on the client and server. (this is what makes renderToString() valuable) I guess I could be extremely careful in writing the server output, and writing the client output to match, but at that point, I'd be writing it twice... and I could use any language... unfortunately, it'd probably end up being Handlebars.
    - v_lisivka 9y ago
      It's for client side, not for server side. It's compiled into Wasm and delivered to client. You can use same code for server-side pre-rendering (for faster loading or for search engine indexing), but it is not main goal of Yew.
- meritt 9y ago
  I'm not very familiar with the React ecosystem but I thought the entire point was letting the client-side handle rendering and passing structured data via API calls? renderToString() sounds like it's doing what every scripting language and templating framework has been doing for the past 20 years?

grayrest 9y ago

> What's the relevance of learning Rust for someone into web development? Rust is a language that cares a lot about correctness. If I were particularly interested in making sure the code I wrote worked in production, Rust would be my first choice in the set of a dozen languages I know. Rust is probably quite a bit faster than whatever you're using for web development. The normal counterpoint to this is that web requests tend to be rate limited by the database. This is mostly true but using Rust pretty much guarantees this will be the case. I believe that this point isn't that compelling with current architectures but would be worthwhile in a CQRS architecture where formatted data gets pushed/cached by the web servers and servicing requests stays on-machine. Rust is one of the more compelling web assembly languages due to not needing a garbage collector. Demos exist but this is mostly in the exploratory stages. Longer term, I expect Rust to have a unified async networking stack. You can do blocking IO networking in Rust but I expect most network clients/servers to be mostly async once the Tokio stack settles. This is all expected in node but the networking libraries tend to be fractured in most languages. I don't think you should run out and switch over to Rust for general web development. There's going to be a big release in the fall that rolls up a bunch of ergonomic/convenience stuff that should make it easier to pick up and less annoying to use. I also think that IDE support will be important for a lot of people learning Rust. The situation is improving but the support is not up to par compared to more mature languages. All told, it's serviceable but I don't expect it to be particularly compelling as a web development language for at least another year or two.

steveklabnik 9y ago

We have an entire working group dedicated to looking at the end-to-end web story this year, both backend and front end. Things are still a bit rough, but coming along nicely. The next release of Rust includes a major language feature that’s helpful when writing asynchronous code (impl Trait), for example.