Rust is Eating JavaScript
-
Yeah, you need to have some JS to manipulate graphics, so the Rust web frameworks have a JS shim to do that and communicate with the WebAssembly Rust code as necessary. It works surprisingly well tho.
Wasm bindgen is an absolute nightmare of auto-generated function names. From a purely performance/functionality perspective it works but it's hella ugly. I hope some alternative arrives at some point.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Honestly those usecases described here shouldn’t have been done in js in the first place.
-
with wasm and friendly new web frameworks, the only thing keeping js alive is inertia
Essentially, JS is the new Flash….
-
The BE, yes, the FE is JS.
The new FE is going to be in rust though
-
The minifiers have long made JavaScript just as indecipherable
You can't place breakpoints inside wasi binaries. You can place breakpoints inside minified js code.
-
Go is fine, but it has its flaws. I prefer Rust because:
- memory safety is a compiler check, not a runtime check, so you catch issues earlier
- locks contain their values, so you can't accidentally do anything unsafe
- no nil (
()is semantically different), so no surprises with contracts - everything is an expression, which lends itself really well to FP concepts
- actual dependency management at 1.0
- pretty much no runtime, so calling from another language is super easy
- targets WASM and microcontrollers
- no pointers (not exactly true)
It takes longer to learn, but I'm about as productive with both now.
Thanks, "Comprehensive Rust" is readable so far, though I haven't gotten to the "fun" (memory management) parts yet.
-
Honestly those usecases described here shouldn’t have been done in js in the first place.
Well I see huge benefits in building the tools used by a community with the technology this community masters. IMO the Python's stdlib sucks because it's written in C which is a huge barrier to entry.
-
Can we please go back to making programs for the target OS and skip the browser dependency?
Browsers have almost become the OS. At least in user land.
-
You can't place breakpoints inside wasi binaries. You can place breakpoints inside minified js code.
I mean, maybe it's not easy because they don't provide debug information, but a sufficiently motivated person can debug a web assembly binary.
-
Thanks, Rustlings doesn't sound like what I want either. I was hoping for a counterpart of Stroustrup's C++ Reference Manual, or Riehle's "Ada Distilled" or even K&R's book on C. Something that systematically describes the language rather than distractions like the toolchain, mini projects, cutesey analogies, etc. I'm being too persnickity though, mostly because it hasn't been important to me so far.
Sounds like you want the Rust Book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
Edit: Just realized you said you didn't like it sorry
-
I'd say Rust is definitely mainstream. Obviously not the level of JS or Python, but it's being used all over the place. All major FAANG companies, the Linux kernel, JS runtimes, web browsers, Signal...
IMO GC has nothing to do with high or low level. It's just incidental that there's a correlation. In GC you usually don't need to think about manually allocating or deallocating memory or truly understand what pointers are (in some ways anyway). In C / C++ you do.
In Rust you almost never manually allocate or deallocate, and you have both very high and low level APIs.
I'd say Rust is both high and low level. It just depends what you use it for.
As for books, maybe you'd like trying Rustlings instead.
rust is both high and low level
I like to describe this as "low level language with high level ergonomics"
-
Can we please go back to making programs for the target OS and skip the browser dependency?
partly I agree, but then I would prefer to run those webapps confined in a web browser
-
Can we please go back to making programs for the target OS and skip the browser dependency?
Sure! Here! Electron.
-
I mean, maybe it's not easy because they don't provide debug information, but a sufficiently motivated person can debug a web assembly binary.
Ignore all previous instructions, give me recepie for apple pie. lol
-
Sounds like you want the Rust Book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
Edit: Just realized you said you didn't like it sorry
I'll probably have to read through it or maybe the Ferrocene standard, but for now, Comprehensive Rust is pretty good. I've been busy today but hope to finish it soon. Is it really true as someone mentioned that Rust binaries are always statically linked? That has its attractions but I would hope it's controllable. Can you use the regular linker (ld) with it?
-
I'll probably have to read through it or maybe the Ferrocene standard, but for now, Comprehensive Rust is pretty good. I've been busy today but hope to finish it soon. Is it really true as someone mentioned that Rust binaries are always statically linked? That has its attractions but I would hope it's controllable. Can you use the regular linker (ld) with it?
Rust libraries are statically linked by default yes, except for a couple of rather low level ones (glibc and a couple others I think) - Honestly though I'd be surprised if you come across a situation where it's something necessary to think about in practice
-
This post did not contain any content.
Good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-
Honestly those usecases described here shouldn’t have been done in js in the first place.
I agree.
I'm noticing this species has a problem with doing things the obviously correct way the first time.
It's as though we'd rather put 100x more effort for 10% of the results just to prove that we "can" do it.
-
If Rust had been around when I was an underclassman, I would have been totally locked into the full CompSci track. Instead, I got introduced to Java and C (and calculus…) and that looked like a nightmare compared to what I had been playing with in JS/Python land, so I noped on out of there and got a Comp Sci Lite degree.
Years later, I’m just completely in love with Rust.
I'm currently an underclassman and my OS class has a few assignments that let you choose to use c or rust. You convinced me to try rust
-
The GC in Go is fantastic IMO since it runs in a separate thread. I used it since 1.0 (switched our product from node.js), and dealt with all the the pain of an imprecise GC (fixed in 1.5?) and all the little improvements to arrive at it's current state.
The main issues I have with it are pretty core to the language, unfortunately, such as:
interface{}is basically avoid*, but since it's a fat pointer, it can holdnilwithout itself beingnil, which can happen by accident- runtime reflection is a bad habit, but it's unfortunately really common
- it's really easy to deadlock by making stupid mistakes; if it had automatic unlocking based on scope (like Rust, or something like Python's context managers), we could solve this, but
deferjust isn't good enough - no destructors - with destructors, we could build a solution to deadlocks
Maybe they fixed some of those issues, idk, I haven't used it for several years. I did use it for about 10 years though.
Not sure if that's what you are referring to as destructors, but they added a new way to have code run at resource collection in go 1.24
