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I agree that wasm should be the future of web, but to be honest I'm not sure rust is the best candidate to replace JS from the developer perspective. For one t

by skohan 5y ago

I agree that wasm should be the future of web, but to be honest I'm not sure rust is the best candidate to replace JS from the developer perspective. For one thing, Rust is slow to compile. I built a simple one-page app in rust/wasm to kick the tires, and it was much slower from a developer perspective than for instance a react/ts app. Even with hot reloading set up, it took noticeably longer for the rust app to refresh after hitting the save button. Also rust is fairly demanding on the programmer. Right now there are an army of js programmers keeping the web running. To be perfectly honest, I don't think there is sufficient supply of programmers in the world with the aptitude to replace all those js programmers with rust programmers. Due to the sheer scale of the web, front-end programming has to be fairly easy for things to keep moving at the pace which they are. I hope wasm does supplant js as the main deployment target for web development. But I think it will have to be a much simpler language than rust which is the one targeting wasm.

rektide 5y ago
> I agree that wasm should be the future of web, but to be honest I'm not sure rust is the best candidate to replace JS from the developer perspective. Rust & wasm don't replace JS, in my view. They're there to create good libraries & frameworks for the scripting languages to consume & use, at many times. There will definitely be some Rust entering the scene, but I tend to think Rust & other wasms will not be the entire web app, but be used for engineering the better crafted, more re-usable bits. Wasms success, imo, is ultimately gated on how well it's host-object bindings work. Wasm doesn't really yet play well with JS. Rust has a fairly unique edge right now in that Rust pioneered their own wasm<->js foreign interfacing, via wasm-bindgen, then generated a web-sys crate with all the web foreign objects already defined in it, allowing Rust far better inter-operation. Because host-object binding/ interface types/ &c are still in-progress, there's much less ability to experiment with what pieces of the webapp make sense to keep in JS, and what pieces make sense to go engineer in wasm. We'll see more interesting blends, with more webdevs writing JS, but consuming/authoring against Wasm tools, as we start to emerge a real wasm ABI.

by skohan 5y ago

rektide 5y ago

> I agree that wasm should be the future of web, but to be honest I'm not sure rust is the best candidate to replace JS from the developer perspective. Rust & wasm don't replace JS, in my view. They're there to create good libraries & frameworks for the scripting languages to consume & use, at many times. There will definitely be some Rust entering the scene, but I tend to think Rust & other wasms will not be the entire web app, but be used for engineering the better crafted, more re-usable bits. Wasms success, imo, is ultimately gated on how well it's host-object bindings work. Wasm doesn't really yet play well with JS. Rust has a fairly unique edge right now in that Rust pioneered their own wasm<->js foreign interfacing, via wasm-bindgen, then generated a web-sys crate with all the web foreign objects already defined in it, allowing Rust far better inter-operation. Because host-object binding/ interface types/ &c are still in-progress, there's much less ability to experiment with what pieces of the webapp make sense to keep in JS, and what pieces make sense to go engineer in wasm. We'll see more interesting blends, with more webdevs writing JS, but consuming/authoring against Wasm tools, as we start to emerge a real wasm ABI.