Rust Is Eating JavaScript (2023)

Sharing types between React and a Typescript backend is great DX for developing both in parallel and I've not seen anything that comes close to being as enjoyable. Being able to change the signature of an API endpoint and immediately having all places in the codebase where the change will cause problems flagged as type errors is wonderful. I went back to working with duplicated types across python/typescript on a contract project recently and it took me 5x longer to fix the downstream implications of signature changes.

Title should really be &quot;Rust Is Eating JavaScript Tooling&quot;.<p>Except for a nod to WASM, all the examples are about the JavaScript toolchain.

I&#x27;m the author of one of the WASM-JS frameworks listed in the article. I now do frontends mainly in HTML + CSS + JS.

I think the future of JS is going to be a lot like Python - you write your code with JS libraries because of the ergonomics, but critical pieces of those libraries are implemented in WASM under the hood.<p>For example, you’ll still write your React components, but the React framework itself might be written in Rust and compiled down to WASM to make everything snappier (e.g. DOM diffing).<p>I personally really love this pattern because it strikes a balance between speed and DX. Not everything has to maximize performance, and not everything has to maximize productivity.

Clickbaity misleading title. Should read &quot;Rust is Eating Javascript Tooling&quot;.

It’s eating Python too - with Ruff, uv, and an upcoming alternative to Mypy:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;crmarsh.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lgvhzdfrps26" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;crmarsh.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lgvhzdfrps26</a>

Most of the article appears to be discussing Rust being adopted into the JavaScript toolchain as opposed to directly replacing it in web development.

LOL, no. Rust is not eating javascript but COMPILED languges are, and only in the build pipeline. Rust does not matter, even Go is far more superior than anything in JS land.<p>Eg. My webpack builds in 35 seconds. The i try esbuild and it does the same job in 35ms. Insane! Ok now lets try rust, now i get 20ms. Wow!<p>Do i care about 35ms -&gt; 20ms? Nope, not one bit. I just want it to compile under 1second.

This could use a (2021)

God this comment thread is a series of unsubstantiated subjective opinions trashing languages that people don’t like and ignoring the faults of the languages they do….<p>Why must we rehash this type of post every few months?

the poll mentioned <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;devongovett&#x2F;status&#x2F;1261379312898306048" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;devongovett&#x2F;status&#x2F;1261379312898306048</a><p>was between (js) and (go&#x2F;C&#x2F;rust)<p>See the problem to me is that this comparison isn&#x27;t nice. Javascript comes with a lot of its problems , so of course people would want go &#x2F; C &#x2F; rust<p>but Now the author thus concluding that people want &quot;the fastest&quot; out of go&#x2F;C&#x2F;rust is just wrong.<p>I love golang.<p>People like fast software but hate abandoned software even more . Yes there are rustaceans who would love the project but now hand anybody genuinely interested to contribute a rust project and ask them to learn rust and they would come hating at you.<p>And now ask them to learn go. They can actually much easily do that.<p>I stand with this opinion that go code can be read &#x2F; written by anybody. There is very rare bad go code but rust code feels &quot;magic&quot; to people.<p>Admire simplicity. That being said , I use archlinux with paru instead of yay , I use a lot of rust tools as well.<p>To be honest , to me it doesn&#x27;t matter that much , what matters is if its being maintained stable &#x2F; has active community. It could be written in any language just make it easy to embed &#x2F; provide bindings for major languages like python node golang etc. Or though this might come overkill but I wish if there was some sort of glue code which can bridge languages , most of these glue code libraries end up having so many use cases. so I like the idea of wasm but its just not that performant. If we can have insanely performant wasm ...

My impression is that the JS guru crowd is made of cool kids and very sensitive to what’s in fashion this week - and that’s definitely Rust.<p>Here on HN there is plenty of announces of new things “like X but in Rust” - even when X would be fine in Python or Bash.

JavaScript never should have been used for those things in the first place

Not sure if I agree with the article. I saw this YC company recently and I think their vision for NPM install &quot;fullstack app&quot; is compelling: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;launches&#x2F;Lkp-freestyle-a-new-way-to-build-fullstack-typescript-apps">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;launches&#x2F;Lkp-freestyle-a-new-way...</a>

I wish F# took off like Rust. I know they are very different. But it invokes same &#x27;feel&#x27;, and have a lot of same benefits.

Rust is great, but it&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s &quot;fast&quot; to develop in. JS, Python, and Go are all languages that can move a lot faster because you have less rules to follow. Maybe an _expert_ Rust eng can move just as fast, but you&#x27;ll still move as slow as your slowest team member most likely

Just because a language doesn’t have a garbage collector doesn’t mean you don’t create any garbage to collect.

WebAssembly is still very limited and not a &quot;first class&quot; language in browser, not sure why..

A triumph of hope over experience.

more like javascript eating rust

babel is so bad versus swc brought a 10 fold increase in speed on the frontend

It seems Zig is getting in on the game too now, with Bun leading the way.

You left out Leptos!

by this logic, rust is eating python as well.

No, it is not!

So is Go, and so is Python. The LLM craze shifted the focus from JS to Python a while back, and I’m all for it.<p>That doesn’t mean I’m under the delusion that JS is going away anytime soon; at least from the FE. But its monopoly on the web took a big hit—and rightfully so.<p>JS is a terrible language, and people who only know that one language will fight tooth and nail with anyone who opposes them.<p>This gave birth to the awful trend of using JS in the backend. I understand that sometimes JS is the only option for frontend work, but keep that junk out of my sysarch. There are better languages your backend can benefit from—Go, Rust, Zig, Kotlin, Python—anything but JS&#x2F;TS.<p>I’m glad the industry has learned from its mistakes. I’m seeing far fewer Node.js backend jobs and a lot more Python, Go, Rust, and C# roles.

The new thing that gadget addicted males love because it&#x27;s shiny and it&#x27;s better and safer and the ultimate cool.<p>Come everyone. C is dead, Javascript is dying.<p>Also it is used by the bigdiks, like facebook who can&#x27;t make a proper comment system, yet they market react as another shiny thing. And Apple who always turn your bluetooth back on after update. And google, who act like inbred mutants thanks to the incest that is going on there. A W S, the three letter magic thing also uses it. Plus cloud!<p>And the list goes on! Plus it has fugly syntax, but who cares, it is memory safe!<p>Jump onboard, this is the future!