I find the dependency creep for both rust and node unfortunate. Almost anything I add explodes the deps and makes me sweat for maintenance, vulnerabilities, etc. I also feel perpetually behind, which I think is basically frontend default mode. Go does the one thing I wish Rust had more of which is a pretty darn great standard library with total backwards compatibility promises. There are awkward things with Go, but man, not needing to feel paranoid and how much can be built with so little feels good. But I totally understand just getting crap done and taking off the tin foil. Depends on what you prioritize. Solo devs don't have the luxury.
Those deps have to come from somewhere, right? Unless you're actually rolling your own everything, and with languages that don't have package managers what you end up doing is just adding submodules of various libraries and running their cmake configs, which is at least as insecure as NPM or Crates.io.
Go is a bit unique a it has a really substantial stdlib, so you eliminate some of the necessary deps, but it's also trivial to rely on established packages like Tokio etc, vendor them into your codebase, and not have to worry about it in the future.
> Those deps have to come from somewhere, right? Unless you're actually rolling your own everything
The point is someone needs to curate those "deps". It's not about rolling your own, it's about pulling standard stuff from standard places where you have some hope that smart people have given thought to how to audit, test, package, integrate and maintain the "deps".
NPM and Cargo and PyPI all have this disease (to be fair NPM has it much worse) where it's expected that this is all just the job of some magical Original Author and it's not anyone's business to try to decide for middleware what they want to rely on. And that way lies surprising bugs, version hell, and eventually supply chain attacks.
The curation step is a critical piece of infrastructure: thing things like the Linux maintainer hierarchy, C++ Boost, Linux distro package systems, or in its original conception the Apache Foundation (though they've sort of lost the plot in recent years). You can pull from those sources, get lots of great software with attested (!) authorship, and be really quite certain (not 100%, but close) that something in the middle hasn't been sold to Chinese Intelligence.
But the Darwinian soup of Dueling Language Platforms all think they can short circuit that process (because they're in a mad evangelical rush to get more users) and still ship good stuff. They can't.
Big caveat that this is just for me personally, but uv has fixed this for me personally. Game changing improvement for Python. Appropriately, uv is written in rust.
1. The web standard APIs themselves
2. It's own standard library inspired by Go's standard library (plus some niceties like TOML minus some things not wanted in a JS/TS standard library since they're already in the web standard APIs)
3. Node's standard library (AKA: built-in modules) to maintain backwards compatibility with node.
Bun has 1 and 3, and sort of has it's own version of 2 (haphazard, not inspired by go, and full of bun-isms which you may like but may not, but standard database drivers is nice).
These are two sides of the same coin. Go has its quirks because they put things in the standard library so they can't iterate (in breaking manners), while Rust can iterate and improve ideas much faster as it's driven by the ecosystem.
Edit: changed "perfect" to "improve", as I meant "perfect" as "betterment" not in terms of absolute perfection.
The golang.org/x/ namespace is the other half of the standard library in all but name. That gets iterated often.
For stuff in the standard library proper, the versioning system is working well for it. For example, the json library is now at v2. Code relying on the original json API can still be compiled.
There is a moral hazard here. By accepting that APIs are forever, you tend to be more cautious and move toward getting it right the first time.
Slower is better... And also faster in the long run, as things compose.
Personally, I do believe that there is one best way to do things quite often, but time constraints make people settle.
At least it is my experience building some systems.
Not sure it is always a good calculus to defer the hard thinking to later.
The cost of "perfecting" an idea here is ruining the broader ecosystem. It is much much better for an API to be kinda crappy (but stable) for historical reasons than dealing with the constant churn and fragmentation caused by, for example, the fifth revision of that URL routing library that everyone uses because everyone uses it. It only gets worse by the orthogonal but comorbid attitude of radically minimizing the scope of dependencies.
The dependency creep keeps on happening in web frameworks where ever you look.
I was thinking of this quote from the article:
> Take it or leave it, but the web is dynamic by nature. Most of the work is serializing and deserializing data between different systems, be it a database, Redis, external APIs, or template engines. Rust has one of the best (de)serialization libraries in my opinion: serde. And yet, due to the nature of safety in Rust, I’d find myself writing boilerplate code just to avoid calling .unwrap(). I’d get long chain calls of .ok_or followed by .map_err. I defined a dozen of custom error enums, some taking other enums, because you want to be able to handle errors properly, and your functions can’t just return any error.
I was thinking: This is so much easier in Haskell.
Rather than chains of `ok_or()` and `map_err()` you use the functor interface
It's just infinitely more readable and using the single `<$>` operator spares you an infinite number of `map_or` and `ok_or` and other error handling.
However, having experience in large commercial Haskell projects, I can tell you the web apps also suffer from the dreaded dependency explosion. I know of one person who got fired from a project due to no small fact that building the system he was presented with took > 24 hours when a full build was triggered, and this happened every week. He was on an older system, and the company failed to provide him with something newer, but ultimately it is a failing of the "everything and the kitchen sink" philosophy at play in dependency usage.
I don't have a good answer for this. I think aggressive dependency reduction and tracking transitive dependency lists is one step forward, but it's only a philosophy rather than a system.
Rust has trouble supporting higher-kinded types like Functor (even though an equivalent feature is available, namely Generic Associated Types) due to the distinctions it makes between owned and referenced data that have no equivalent in Haskell. Whether these higher abstractions can still be used elegantly despite that complexity is something that should be explored via research, this whole area is not ready for feature development.
php is the only popular language that regularly removes insane legacy cruft (to be fair, they have more insane cruft than almost any other language to begin with).
I've found Go's standard library to be really unfortunate compared to rust.
When I update the rust compiler, I do so with very little fear. My code will still work. The rust stdlib backwards compatible story has been very solid.
Updating the Go compiler, I also get a new stdlib, and suddenly I get a bunch of TLS version deprecation, implicit http2 upgrades, and all sorts of new runtime errors which break my application (and always at runtime, not compiletime). Bundling a large standard library with the compiler means I can't just update the tls package or just update the image package, I have to take it or leave it with the whole thing. It's annoying.
They've decided the go1 promise means "your code will still compile, but it will silently behave differently, like suddenly 'time1 == time2' will return a different result, or 'http.Server' will use a different protocol", and that's somehow backwards compatible.
I also find the go stdlib to have so many warts now that it's just painful. Don't use "log", use "log/slog", except the rest of the stdlib that takes a logger uses "log.Logger" because it predates "slog", so you have to use it. Don't use the non-context methods (like 'NewRequest' is wrong, use 'NewRequestWithContext', don't use net.Dial, etc), except for all the places context couldn't be bolted on.
Don't use 'image/draw', use 'golang.org/x/image/draw' because they couldn't fix some part of it in a backwards compatible way, so you should use the 'x/' package. Same for syscall vs x/unix. But also, don't use 'golang.org/x/net/http2' because that was folded into 'net/http', so there's not even a general rule of "use the x package if it's there", it's actually "keep up with the status of all the x packages and sometimes use them instead of the stdlib, sometimes use the stdlib instead of them".
Go's stdlib is a way more confusing mess than rust. In rust, the ecosystem has settled on one logging library interface, not like 4 (log, slog, zap, logrus). In rust, updates to the stdlib are actually backwards compatible, not "oh, yeah, sha1 certs are rejected now if you update the compiler for better compile speeds, hope you read the release notes".
> When I update the rust compiler, I do so with very little fear. My code will still work. The rust stdlib backwards compatible story has been very solid.
This is not always true, as seen with rustc 1.80 and the time crate. While it only changed type inference, that still caused some projects like Nix a lot of trouble.
Man, I've been using Go as my daily driver since 2012 and I think I can count the number of breaking changes I've run into on one finger, and that was a critical security vulnerability. I have no doubt there have been others, but I've not had the misfortune of running into them.
> Don't use "log", use "log/slog", except the rest of the stdlib that takes a logger uses "log.Logger" because it predates "slog", so you have to use it.
What in the standard library takes a logger at all? I don't think I've ever passed a logger into the standard library.
> the ecosystem has settled on one logging library interface, not like 4 (log, slog, zap, logrus)
I've only seen slog since slog was added to the standard library. Pretty sure I've seen logrus or similar in the Kubernetes code, but that predated slog by a wide margin and anyway I don't recall seeing _any_ loggers in library code.
> In rust, the ecosystem has settled on one logging library interface
I mean, in Rust everyone has different advice on which crates to use for error handling and when to use each of them. You definitely don't have _more standards_ in the Rust ecosystem.
Honestly this is one of the biggest reasons I stick with Elixir. Between Elixir’s standard library, the BEAM/OTP, and Phoenix (with Ecto)—- I honestly have very few dependencies for web projects. I rarely, at this point, find the need to add anything to new projects except for maybe Mox (mocking library) and Faker (for generating bits of test data). And now that the Jason (JSON) library has been more or less integrated into OTP I don’t even have to pull it in. Elixir dev experience is truly unmatched (IMHO) these days.
the idea of one language to rule them all is very compelling. it’s been promised a lot, and now everyone hates Java.
but the truth is that Rust is not meant for everything. UI is an abstraction layer that is very human and dynamic. and i can come and say, “well, we can hide that dynamism with clever graph composition tricks” à la Elm, React, Compose, etc, but the machinery that you have to build for even the simplest button widget in almost every Rust UI toolkit is a mess of punctuation, with things like lifetimes and weird state management systems. you end up building a runtime when what you want is just the UI. that’s what higher level languages were made for. of course data science could be done in Rust as well, but is the lifetime of the file handle you’re trying to open really what you’re worried about when doing data analysis?
i think Rust has a future in the UI/graphics engine space, but you have to be pretty stubborn to use it for your front end.
There are real advantages to choosing a jack of all trades language for everything; for example it makes it easier for an engineer on one part of your project to help out on a different part of your project.
But it sounds like the OP didn't get any of the benefits of "jack of all trades", nor did he choose a field where Rust is "master of some".
Yes. This is one of the things that drives me nuts about a lot of titles on here: the context like “for the web” changes how it’s is interpreted a great deal. I see the same thing when I see posts about other languages and AI and such. Context matters versus making it sound like a broad, general statement. Alas, the broad, general statements likely get more engagement..
Agreed! The context matters a lot. Rust is a great language, but using it for the web is a poor choice just like using JS outside the web is a poor choice. Programming languages all have domains where they do well or poorly, and trying to make a single language work for all cases is a fool's errand.
Aiui they are also migrating their backend api(s) from rust to node. They were already using astro with rust on the backend (after dropping ssr with tera).
I'm a heavy Rust user and fan, but I'd never pick Rust for web. There are way more mature ecosystems out there to choose from. Why would you waste "innovation tokens" in a Rust-based web application?
I think there's a couple stories of people shipping some performant "webapp"-y stuff in Rust... but of course you can just compile those kinds of components and write the rest of your app in any other system
I enjoyed using Rust/WASM for a web application I made. Once I got the build step figured out, which took a week, the application worked like I wanted right away.
I was trying to build an HTML generator in Rust and got pretty far, but I don't think I'll ever be happy with the API unless I learn some pretty crazy macro stuff, which I don't want. For the latter project, the "innovation tokens" really rings true for me, I spent months on the HTML gen for not much benefit.
For a web backend? Rust is pretty mature there, it doesn't even feel like an innovation token - it's by my favorite thing to use Rust for.
You have very mature webservers, asyncio, ORMs, auth, etc., it's very easy to write, and the type safety helps a ton.
In 2020 it might have taken some innovation tokens, but the only things that require a ton less (for web backend) are probably Java, python, and node.js, and they all have their unique pain points that it doesn't seem at all crazy?
due to the nature of safety in Rust, I’d find myself writing boilerplate code just to avoid calling .unwrap(). I’d get long chain calls of .ok_or followed by .map_err. I defined a dozen of custom error enums, some taking other enums, because you want to be able to handle errors properly, and your functions can’t just return any error.
This can be a double edged sword. Yes, languages like python and typescript/JavaScript will let you not catch an exception, which can be convenient. But that also often leads to unexpected errors popping up in production.
Often is not the word I'd use, from my experience.
The times something like that happened to me AND wasn't a trivial fix can be counted on half a hand. A tradeoff I'd take any day to not have to deal with rust all of the time.
> Similar thing can be said about writing SQL. I was really happy with using sqlx, which is a crate for compile-time checked SQL queries. By relying on macros in Rust, sqlx would execute the query against a real database instance in order to make sure that your query is valid, and the mappings are correct. However, writing dynamic queries with sqlx is a PITA, as you can’t build a dynamic string and make sure it’s checked during compilation, so you have to resort to using non-checked SQL queries. And honestly, with kysely in Node.js, I can get a similar result, without the need to have a connection to the DB, while having ergonomic query builder to build dynamic queries, without the overhead of compilation time.
I've used sqlx, and its alright, but I've found things much easier after switching to sea-orm. Sea-orm has a wonderful query builder that makes it feel like you are writing SQL. Whereas with sqlx you end up writing Rust that generates SQL strings, ie re-inventing query builders.
You also get type checking; define your table schema as a struct, and sea-orm knows what types your columns are. No active connection required. This approach lets you use Rust types for fields, eg Email from the email crate or Url from the url crate, which lets you constrain fields even further than what is easy to do at the DB layer.
ORMs tend to get a bad reputation for how some ORMs implement the active record pattern. For example, you might forget something is an active record and write something like "len(posts)" in sqlalchemy and suddenly you are counting records by pulling them from the DB in one by one. I haven't had this issue with sea-orm, because it is very clear about what is an active record and what is not, and it is very clear when you are making a request out to the DB. For me, it turns out 90% of the value of an ORM is the query builder.
sqlx doesn't build queries, or at least it minimally builds them. Which I think is the thing the OP is complaining about.
And, IMO, making dynamic queries harder is preferable. Dynamic queries are inherently unsafe. Sometimes necessary, however you have to start considering things like sql injection attacks with dynamic queries.
This isn't to poo poo sea-orm. I'm just saying that sqlx's design choice to make dynamic queries hard is a logical choice from a safety standpoint.
They didn't make them hard by design, I think, it's just the limitations of the current API and prioritisation. Dynamic queries are possible, just not trivial
> And, IMO, making dynamic queries harder is preferable. Dynamic queries are inherently unsafe. Sometimes necessary, however you have to start considering things like sql injection attacks with dynamic queries.
Depends on what you mean by "dynamic query". You are dealing with injection attacks as soon as you start taking user input. Most useful user facing applications take user input.
In a simple case it might be "SELECT * FROM posts WHERE title LIKE '%hello world%', where "hello world" is a user specified string. This is easy with sqlx. Where things get more difficult is if you want to optionally add filters for things like date posted, score of the post, author, etc... That makes the query dynamic in a way that can't be solved by simply including a bind.
That's where sea-orm shines over sqlx IMO. sqlx will force you to do something like
```
let mut my_query = "SELECT * FROM posts WHERE title LIKE '%' + $1 + '%'";
let mut my_binds = vec![args.keyword];
if let Some(date) = args.date {
my_query = format("{my_query} AND date = $2");
my_binds.push(date);
}
...
```
Your building a string and tracking binds. It gets messy. A good query builder like seaorm has lets you do something this:
```
let mut query = Posts::find().filter(Column::title::like(args.keyword));
if let Some(date) = args.date {
query = query.filter(column::Date::eq(date));
}
```
This pays off as your queries get more complicated. It pushes the string manipulation and bookkeeping into a library, which can be more thoroughly tested.
It also lets you pass around typed partial queries, eg in the example above query might be returned from a function, which helps you build more modular code.
The TS/React ecosystem is so mature, it's hard for Rust to compete with it. My optimal stack is currently: Rust on the backend, Typescript/React for web with OpenAPI for shared types.
React and its ecosystem is a pile of garbage perpetuated by industry inertia. UseState, useMemo, useThisAndThat where you have to guess whether that dependency will cause a re-render? Or 20 different routers, state managers, query builders? I'm not even talking about html-in-ts with `!!a && (<div>...</div>)` A stodgy, bloated, overhyped and misused monstrosity, that's what React is.
useMemo is definitely a scourge on my existence. Doesn't help that a bunch of people write articles like "don't bother with it!!" when memoisation results can cause actual real bugs when integrating with a third party lib.
Unmounting and then remounting the same component is actually a bad thing when you lose your component state in the process. And when you have enough useEffect's in your system that's exactly what happens unless you're liberally sprinkling useMemo
Running rust in wasm works really well. I feel like I'm the world's biggest cheerleader for it, but I was just amazed at how well it works. The one annoying thing is using web APIs through rust - you can do it with web-sys and js-sys, but it's rarely as ergonomic as it is in javascript. I usually end up writing wrapper libraries that make it easy, sometimes even easier than javascript (e.g. in rust I can use weblocks with RAII)
It does work well logically but performance is pretty bad. I had a nontrivial Rust project running on Cloudflare Workers, and CPU time very often clocked 10-60ms per request. This is >50x what the equivalent JS worker probably would've clocked. And in that environment you pay for CPU time...
I'm doing this now and it's mostly great but the openapi generators are not good. At least the Typescript ones produce confusing function signatures and invalid type syntax in some cases.
I would assume today that maybe Dioxus or Leptos would be considered. Though that would be the "all in" approach on Rust front to back... it wouldn't really reduce some of the handling conditions levied in the article though.
I find C# can be a really good middle ground on the backend (not a blazor fan)... the syntax and expressiveness improves with every release. You can burrow as lot of patterns from the likes of Go as well as FP approaches. What I don't care for are excessively complex (ie: "Enterprise") environments where complexity is treated like a badge of honor instead of the burden of spaghetti that it is in practice.
It's a throwaway comment in the article, but I feel it's important to push back on: HTML is very definitely a programming language, by any reasonable definition of "programming language".
Edit to add: It might not be an imperative language, but having written some HTML and asked the computer to interpret it, the computer now has a programmed capability, determined by what was written, that's repeatable and that was not available apart from the HTML given. QED.
HTML requires you to understand symbolic representations, where <> means something special. It is more verbose, but no more structurally complex, than Markdown. It does not require you to understand imperative dynamic logic. Getting the hang of symbolic representations is easy, and getting the hang of imperative programming is very hard and most people can't do it. That's why the dividing line is where it is. Making a static bulleted list isn't a 'capability' in HTML if you weren't thinking it was one in Markdown, and inventing your own precisely crafted definition with no purpose other than to include HTML then calling all others unreasonable doesn't convince anyone.
How would one do an if condition or enumerate a list in HTML alone? For that functionality you need another language to generate/manipulate the HTML.. not to mention interpreting HTML for display.
HTML is a markup language, it's even in the name... but it's not a complete programming language by any stretch.
It's not Turing-complete, and as you say, it's a markup language and it's not general purpose. But neither is a necessary component of "programming language".
Rust shines in user-space systems-level applications (databases, cloud infrastructure, etc.) but definitely feels a bit out of place in more business-logic heavy applications.
> And the occasional struggles with typescript where the runtime seems to be changing too often; is it ts-node? tsx? tsm? The built-in typescript runtime in node? deno? bun?
This whole paragraph is so true. The last couple of years have been pretty rough in Node land.
Well, yep. People underappreciate the Typescript/JS ecosystem.
Typescript is pretty type-safe, and it's perfectly integrated with hot code reload, debuggers, and all the usual tools. Adding transpilation in that flow only creates friction.
That's also why things like Blazor are going nowhere. C# is nicer than Typescript, but the additional friction of WASM roundtrips just eats all the advantage.
I think the big thing keeping Blazor back is that C# doesn't work well with WASM. It was built at a time when JIT-optimized languages with a larger runtime were in-vogue. That's fine in a lot of cases, but it means that C# isn't well suited for shipping a small amount of code over the wire to browsers. A Blazor payload is going to end up being over 4MB. If you use ahead of time compilation, that can balloon to 3x more. The fact that C# offers internal pointers makes it incompatible with the current WASM GC implementation.
Blazor performance is around 3x slower than React, it'll use 15-20x more RAM, and it's 20x larger over the wire. I think if Blazor could match React performance, it'd be quite popular. As it stands, it's hard to seriously consider it for something where users have other options.
Microsoft has been working to make C#/.NET better for AOT compilation, but it's tough. Java has been going through this too. I don't really know what state it's at, but (for example) when you have a lot of libraries doing runtime code generation, that's fine when you have a JIT compiler running the program. Any new code generated at runtime can be run and optimized like any other code that it's running.
People do underappreciate the JS/TS ecosystem, but I think there are other reasons holding back stuff running on WASM. With Blazor, performance, memory usage, and payload size are big issues. With Flutter and Compose Multiplatform, neither is giving you a normal HTML page and instead just renders onto a canvas. With Rust, projects like Dioxus are small and relatively new. And before WASM GC and the shared heap, there was always more overhead for anything doing DOM stuff. WASM GC is also pretty new - it's only been a little over a year since all the major browsers supported it. We're really in the infancy of other languages in the browser.
I don't know about what other strictness you're referring to but exhaustive enum matching is common check in most TS stacks via eslint. Yea, it's not builtin, just saying there's a solution and it's super common.
This is oddly timed in as much as one of the big success stories I've heard from a friend is their new practice of having Claude Code develop in Rust, than translate that to WebAssembly.
That seems much more like the future than embracing Node... <emoji here>
If you’re making a web app your fancy rust wasm module still has to interface with the dom, so you can’t escape that. Claude might offer you some fake simplicity on that front for awhile, but skeptical that’s it fully scalable
As someone who went in the opposite direction from Node to Rust, I feel like OP is just trading one set of problems for another set of substantially worse problems. I guess the grass is always greener in the other ecosystem ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Idk, it just feels like OP chose all the wrong approaches with Rust, including using a separate language and ecosystem for the frontend, which is where most of the friction comes from. For example, Dioxus is a React clone that is somehow leagues better than React (and Next.js, too), and it has hot-reloading that brings compiles down to subsecond times, which makes building UI with it just as productive as with Node / Vite etc. I use it for server side code as well and it's great. Compilation times can be an issue with Rust, it's something I miss from Go, but there are ways to improve on it, and just being smart about what deps you include, avoiding overuse of macros etc can make a difference. I know these things were not around when OP started using Rust for their application, but they are around now.
Node and TS are quite frankly inferior to Rust in most ways. Bad language, ecosystem full of buggy unmaintained packages with the worse security profile of all the common languages, no unified build tooling that seems to break your project every 6 months, constant churn of blessed frameworks and tools, an stdlib that is not much more comprehensive than Rust's and outright broken in some ways, at least three different approaches to modules (esm, commonjs, umd, and more...?), I could go on an on. There is a reason why everyone seemingly reinvents the wheel in that ecosystem over and over again -- the language and platform is fundamentally not capable of achieving peoples goals, and every solution developed comes with massive tradeoffs that the next iteration attempts to solve, but that just creates additional issues or regressions for future attempts to tackle.
I've been using Rust with Dioxus and was completely mind blown when I started with it. With barely knowing any Rust (just React) I was able to jump right in and build with it, somehow it was more intuitive to me than most modern JS full stack frameworks. It seemingly already has most if not all of the features that similar JS frameworks have been developing for years, and because it's written in Rust things like conditional compilation are built into the language instead of being a third party babel plugin. That helps to remove a ton of friction. And it's trivial to build those same apps for desktop and mobile as well, something that's basically not possible with the JS frameworks.
Even stuff like websockets, go try to implement a type safe web socket connection with a server and client in Next.js or Astro. You'll need a ws library, something like Zod for validation, etc. In Rust it's just:
I think this is spot on. I've used Iced and Dioxus and both are great. I do take the author's point that the actual UI code, even in Dioxus, is verbose. It is. And that's a trade off I'm willing to make for guaranteed correctness.
I haven't used Iced but re. Dioxus, I don't know if it's necessary more verbose conceptually. One of the most frustrating things with React is handling async updates, and while Rust's async story is conceptually difficult, it's ultimately much easier to reason about (imo). Like are we sure a comparable component in React would be any less verbose?
let mut breed = use_signal(|| "hound".to_string());
let dogs = use_resource(move || async move {
reqwest::Client::new()
.get(format!("https://dog.ceo/api/breed/{breed}/images"))
.send()
.await?
.json::<BreedResponse>()
.await
});
rsx! {
input {
value: "{breed}",
oninput: move |e| breed.set(e.value()),
}
div {
display: "flex",
flex_direction: "row",
if let Some(response) = &*dogs.read() {
match response {
Ok(urls) => rsx! {
for image in urls.iter().take(3) {
img {
src: "{image}",
width: "100px",
height: "100px",
}
}
},
Err(err) => rsx! { "Failed to fetch response: {err}" },
}
} else {
"Loading..."
}
}
}
Imo the RSX here is much less verbose than JSX. Inline match statement, inline if statement, inline for loop, .take(3) compared to `Array.from({ length: 3 }).map((_, i) => urls[i]))`, etc etc. This gives you automatic cancellation of the future, whereas with React you would need a third party library like React Query, and then manually abort requests in the asynchronous function with an abort signal -- in Rust, you get that for free. You also get data validation for free, instead of needing eg. Zod for manual runtime validation.
You've been breaking the site guidelines so often and so badly that I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Long compiles are always going to be more friction. No project stays small and quick to compile forever. Get better hardware, and then one day the project is large enough that you're back with long compile times.
I run Rust/Axum for something that's less a web app and more a living system — autonomous agents, real-time state (pulse, mood, health metrics), a frontend that shifts based on internal conditions rather than just user input.
For this kind of use case, Rust's type system isn't overhead — it's the reason things stay coherent when multiple agents are running concurrently. The error handling that feels like boilerplate in a CRUD app actually matters when a missed unwrap means your system silently stops working at 3am.
The article reads to me like someone building a content site in Rust, which yeah, is painful for no reason. But I'd push back on the broader framing — the web is more than blogs and dashboards. When your backend does meaningful autonomous work beyond serializing JSON, Rust pays for itself.
I find the dependency creep for both rust and node unfortunate. Almost anything I add explodes the deps and makes me sweat for maintenance, vulnerabilities, etc. I also feel perpetually behind, which I think is basically frontend default mode. Go does the one thing I wish Rust had more of which is a pretty darn great standard library with total backwards compatibility promises. There are awkward things with Go, but man, not needing to feel paranoid and how much can be built with so little feels good. But I totally understand just getting crap done and taking off the tin foil. Depends on what you prioritize. Solo devs don't have the luxury.
Those deps have to come from somewhere, right? Unless you're actually rolling your own everything, and with languages that don't have package managers what you end up doing is just adding submodules of various libraries and running their cmake configs, which is at least as insecure as NPM or Crates.io.
Go is a bit unique a it has a really substantial stdlib, so you eliminate some of the necessary deps, but it's also trivial to rely on established packages like Tokio etc, vendor them into your codebase, and not have to worry about it in the future.
The tradeoff Go made is that certain code just cannot be written in it.
Its STD exists because Go is a language built around a "good enough" philosophy, and it gets painful once you leave that path.
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> Go is a bit unique a it has a really substantial stdlib
It’s not that unique though. I can say that Python and hell, even PHP have pretty complete but also well documented stdlib.
Java is meh tier but C# is also pretty good in this aspect.
It’s totally a choice for Rust not to have a real stdlib and actually I feel like that would maybe make Rust maybe the best language overall.
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> Those deps have to come from somewhere, right? Unless you're actually rolling your own everything
The point is someone needs to curate those "deps". It's not about rolling your own, it's about pulling standard stuff from standard places where you have some hope that smart people have given thought to how to audit, test, package, integrate and maintain the "deps".
NPM and Cargo and PyPI all have this disease (to be fair NPM has it much worse) where it's expected that this is all just the job of some magical Original Author and it's not anyone's business to try to decide for middleware what they want to rely on. And that way lies surprising bugs, version hell, and eventually supply chain attacks.
The curation step is a critical piece of infrastructure: thing things like the Linux maintainer hierarchy, C++ Boost, Linux distro package systems, or in its original conception the Apache Foundation (though they've sort of lost the plot in recent years). You can pull from those sources, get lots of great software with attested (!) authorship, and be really quite certain (not 100%, but close) that something in the middle hasn't been sold to Chinese Intelligence.
But the Darwinian soup of Dueling Language Platforms all think they can short circuit that process (because they're in a mad evangelical rush to get more users) and still ship good stuff. They can't.
Python used to have a great standard library, too. But now it's stuck with a bunch of obsolete packages and the packaging story for Python is awful.
In a decade or so Go the awkward things about Go will have multiplied significantly and it'll have many of the same problems Python currently has.
> the packaging story for Python is awful.
Big caveat that this is just for me personally, but uv has fixed this for me personally. Game changing improvement for Python. Appropriately, uv is written in rust.
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Lots of removals have already happened and uv took over packaging in Python-land.
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I just ported (this week) a 20-year-old Python app to uv/polars. (With AI it took two days). App is now 20x faster.
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FYI: Deno includes:
1. The web standard APIs themselves 2. It's own standard library inspired by Go's standard library (plus some niceties like TOML minus some things not wanted in a JS/TS standard library since they're already in the web standard APIs) 3. Node's standard library (AKA: built-in modules) to maintain backwards compatibility with node.
Bun has 1 and 3, and sort of has it's own version of 2 (haphazard, not inspired by go, and full of bun-isms which you may like but may not, but standard database drivers is nice).
A Tauri hello world app has about 500(?) deps out of the box, always makes me laugh.
I get that cross platform desktop app is a complicated beast but it gives off those creepy npm vibes.
These are two sides of the same coin. Go has its quirks because they put things in the standard library so they can't iterate (in breaking manners), while Rust can iterate and improve ideas much faster as it's driven by the ecosystem.
Edit: changed "perfect" to "improve", as I meant "perfect" as "betterment" not in terms of absolute perfection.
The golang.org/x/ namespace is the other half of the standard library in all but name. That gets iterated often.
For stuff in the standard library proper, the versioning system is working well for it. For example, the json library is now at v2. Code relying on the original json API can still be compiled.
There is a moral hazard here. By accepting that APIs are forever, you tend to be more cautious and move toward getting it right the first time. Slower is better... And also faster in the long run, as things compose. Personally, I do believe that there is one best way to do things quite often, but time constraints make people settle.
At least it is my experience building some systems.
Not sure it is always a good calculus to defer the hard thinking to later.
The cost of "perfecting" an idea here is ruining the broader ecosystem. It is much much better for an API to be kinda crappy (but stable) for historical reasons than dealing with the constant churn and fragmentation caused by, for example, the fifth revision of that URL routing library that everyone uses because everyone uses it. It only gets worse by the orthogonal but comorbid attitude of radically minimizing the scope of dependencies.
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The dependency creep keeps on happening in web frameworks where ever you look.
I was thinking of this quote from the article:
> Take it or leave it, but the web is dynamic by nature. Most of the work is serializing and deserializing data between different systems, be it a database, Redis, external APIs, or template engines. Rust has one of the best (de)serialization libraries in my opinion: serde. And yet, due to the nature of safety in Rust, I’d find myself writing boilerplate code just to avoid calling .unwrap(). I’d get long chain calls of .ok_or followed by .map_err. I defined a dozen of custom error enums, some taking other enums, because you want to be able to handle errors properly, and your functions can’t just return any error.
I was thinking: This is so much easier in Haskell.
Rather than chains of `ok_or()` and `map_err()` you use the functor interface
Rust:
``` call_api("get_people").map_or("John Doe", |v| get_first_name(v)).map_or(0, |v| get_name_frequency(v)) ```
Haskell:
``` get_first_name . get_name_frequency <$> callApi "get_people" ```
It's just infinitely more readable and using the single `<$>` operator spares you an infinite number of `map_or` and `ok_or` and other error handling.
However, having experience in large commercial Haskell projects, I can tell you the web apps also suffer from the dreaded dependency explosion. I know of one person who got fired from a project due to no small fact that building the system he was presented with took > 24 hours when a full build was triggered, and this happened every week. He was on an older system, and the company failed to provide him with something newer, but ultimately it is a failing of the "everything and the kitchen sink" philosophy at play in dependency usage.
I don't have a good answer for this. I think aggressive dependency reduction and tracking transitive dependency lists is one step forward, but it's only a philosophy rather than a system.
Maybe the ridiculous answer is to go back to php.
Rust has trouble supporting higher-kinded types like Functor (even though an equivalent feature is available, namely Generic Associated Types) due to the distinctions it makes between owned and referenced data that have no equivalent in Haskell. Whether these higher abstractions can still be used elegantly despite that complexity is something that should be explored via research, this whole area is not ready for feature development.
24 hours? is the haskel compiler written in javascript running in a python js-interpreter written in bash?
php is the only popular language that regularly removes insane legacy cruft (to be fair, they have more insane cruft than almost any other language to begin with).
Same. That’s why Go is such a great tool.
I've found Go's standard library to be really unfortunate compared to rust.
When I update the rust compiler, I do so with very little fear. My code will still work. The rust stdlib backwards compatible story has been very solid.
Updating the Go compiler, I also get a new stdlib, and suddenly I get a bunch of TLS version deprecation, implicit http2 upgrades, and all sorts of new runtime errors which break my application (and always at runtime, not compiletime). Bundling a large standard library with the compiler means I can't just update the tls package or just update the image package, I have to take it or leave it with the whole thing. It's annoying.
They've decided the go1 promise means "your code will still compile, but it will silently behave differently, like suddenly 'time1 == time2' will return a different result, or 'http.Server' will use a different protocol", and that's somehow backwards compatible.
I also find the go stdlib to have so many warts now that it's just painful. Don't use "log", use "log/slog", except the rest of the stdlib that takes a logger uses "log.Logger" because it predates "slog", so you have to use it. Don't use the non-context methods (like 'NewRequest' is wrong, use 'NewRequestWithContext', don't use net.Dial, etc), except for all the places context couldn't be bolted on.
Don't use 'image/draw', use 'golang.org/x/image/draw' because they couldn't fix some part of it in a backwards compatible way, so you should use the 'x/' package. Same for syscall vs x/unix. But also, don't use 'golang.org/x/net/http2' because that was folded into 'net/http', so there's not even a general rule of "use the x package if it's there", it's actually "keep up with the status of all the x packages and sometimes use them instead of the stdlib, sometimes use the stdlib instead of them".
Go's stdlib is a way more confusing mess than rust. In rust, the ecosystem has settled on one logging library interface, not like 4 (log, slog, zap, logrus). In rust, updates to the stdlib are actually backwards compatible, not "oh, yeah, sha1 certs are rejected now if you update the compiler for better compile speeds, hope you read the release notes".
> When I update the rust compiler, I do so with very little fear. My code will still work. The rust stdlib backwards compatible story has been very solid.
This is not always true, as seen with rustc 1.80 and the time crate. While it only changed type inference, that still caused some projects like Nix a lot of trouble.
Man, I've been using Go as my daily driver since 2012 and I think I can count the number of breaking changes I've run into on one finger, and that was a critical security vulnerability. I have no doubt there have been others, but I've not had the misfortune of running into them.
> Don't use "log", use "log/slog", except the rest of the stdlib that takes a logger uses "log.Logger" because it predates "slog", so you have to use it.
What in the standard library takes a logger at all? I don't think I've ever passed a logger into the standard library.
> the ecosystem has settled on one logging library interface, not like 4 (log, slog, zap, logrus)
I've only seen slog since slog was added to the standard library. Pretty sure I've seen logrus or similar in the Kubernetes code, but that predated slog by a wide margin and anyway I don't recall seeing _any_ loggers in library code.
> In rust, the ecosystem has settled on one logging library interface
I mean, in Rust everyone has different advice on which crates to use for error handling and when to use each of them. You definitely don't have _more standards_ in the Rust ecosystem.
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With Go it's good to keep in mind the Proverbs, which includes this gem:
Good luck, if little copying is ICU based localization.
Honestly this is one of the biggest reasons I stick with Elixir. Between Elixir’s standard library, the BEAM/OTP, and Phoenix (with Ecto)—- I honestly have very few dependencies for web projects. I rarely, at this point, find the need to add anything to new projects except for maybe Mox (mocking library) and Faker (for generating bits of test data). And now that the Jason (JSON) library has been more or less integrated into OTP I don’t even have to pull it in. Elixir dev experience is truly unmatched (IMHO) these days.
the idea of one language to rule them all is very compelling. it’s been promised a lot, and now everyone hates Java.
but the truth is that Rust is not meant for everything. UI is an abstraction layer that is very human and dynamic. and i can come and say, “well, we can hide that dynamism with clever graph composition tricks” à la Elm, React, Compose, etc, but the machinery that you have to build for even the simplest button widget in almost every Rust UI toolkit is a mess of punctuation, with things like lifetimes and weird state management systems. you end up building a runtime when what you want is just the UI. that’s what higher level languages were made for. of course data science could be done in Rust as well, but is the lifetime of the file handle you’re trying to open really what you’re worried about when doing data analysis?
i think Rust has a future in the UI/graphics engine space, but you have to be pretty stubborn to use it for your front end.
Rust is "Jack of all trades, master of some".
There are real advantages to choosing a jack of all trades language for everything; for example it makes it easier for an engineer on one part of your project to help out on a different part of your project.
But it sounds like the OP didn't get any of the benefits of "jack of all trades", nor did he choose a field where Rust is "master of some".
Lisp is the master of all. Or it would be except "Parens? Eugh! Brotha, eugh!"
Better title: "Farewell, Rust for Web"
Yes. This is one of the things that drives me nuts about a lot of titles on here: the context like “for the web” changes how it’s is interpreted a great deal. I see the same thing when I see posts about other languages and AI and such. Context matters versus making it sound like a broad, general statement. Alas, the broad, general statements likely get more engagement..
Farewell, Rust for Web was a worse title. I thought it meant Rust ended WebAssembly support.
Agreed! The context matters a lot. Rust is a great language, but using it for the web is a poor choice just like using JS outside the web is a poor choice. Programming languages all have domains where they do well or poorly, and trying to make a single language work for all cases is a fool's errand.
Ok, we'll use that above. Thanks!
Yeah Astro is a great choice for a static or mostly static website. Moving to Astro is not a slight on any other language or framework.
Aiui they are also migrating their backend api(s) from rust to node. They were already using astro with rust on the backend (after dropping ssr with tera).
I'm a heavy Rust user and fan, but I'd never pick Rust for web. There are way more mature ecosystems out there to choose from. Why would you waste "innovation tokens" in a Rust-based web application?
I think there's a couple stories of people shipping some performant "webapp"-y stuff in Rust... but of course you can just compile those kinds of components and write the rest of your app in any other system
I enjoyed using Rust/WASM for a web application I made. Once I got the build step figured out, which took a week, the application worked like I wanted right away.
I was trying to build an HTML generator in Rust and got pretty far, but I don't think I'll ever be happy with the API unless I learn some pretty crazy macro stuff, which I don't want. For the latter project, the "innovation tokens" really rings true for me, I spent months on the HTML gen for not much benefit.
For a web backend? Rust is pretty mature there, it doesn't even feel like an innovation token - it's by my favorite thing to use Rust for.
You have very mature webservers, asyncio, ORMs, auth, etc., it's very easy to write, and the type safety helps a ton.
In 2020 it might have taken some innovation tokens, but the only things that require a ton less (for web backend) are probably Java, python, and node.js, and they all have their unique pain points that it doesn't seem at all crazy?
Good to know! You probably saved me a lot of pain.
due to the nature of safety in Rust, I’d find myself writing boilerplate code just to avoid calling .unwrap(). I’d get long chain calls of .ok_or followed by .map_err. I defined a dozen of custom error enums, some taking other enums, because you want to be able to handle errors properly, and your functions can’t just return any error.
This can be a double edged sword. Yes, languages like python and typescript/JavaScript will let you not catch an exception, which can be convenient. But that also often leads to unexpected errors popping up in production.
Often is not the word I'd use, from my experience.
The times something like that happened to me AND wasn't a trivial fix can be counted on half a hand. A tradeoff I'd take any day to not have to deal with rust all of the time.
I want to address this one point:
> Similar thing can be said about writing SQL. I was really happy with using sqlx, which is a crate for compile-time checked SQL queries. By relying on macros in Rust, sqlx would execute the query against a real database instance in order to make sure that your query is valid, and the mappings are correct. However, writing dynamic queries with sqlx is a PITA, as you can’t build a dynamic string and make sure it’s checked during compilation, so you have to resort to using non-checked SQL queries. And honestly, with kysely in Node.js, I can get a similar result, without the need to have a connection to the DB, while having ergonomic query builder to build dynamic queries, without the overhead of compilation time.
I've used sqlx, and its alright, but I've found things much easier after switching to sea-orm. Sea-orm has a wonderful query builder that makes it feel like you are writing SQL. Whereas with sqlx you end up writing Rust that generates SQL strings, ie re-inventing query builders.
You also get type checking; define your table schema as a struct, and sea-orm knows what types your columns are. No active connection required. This approach lets you use Rust types for fields, eg Email from the email crate or Url from the url crate, which lets you constrain fields even further than what is easy to do at the DB layer.
ORMs tend to get a bad reputation for how some ORMs implement the active record pattern. For example, you might forget something is an active record and write something like "len(posts)" in sqlalchemy and suddenly you are counting records by pulling them from the DB in one by one. I haven't had this issue with sea-orm, because it is very clear about what is an active record and what is not, and it is very clear when you are making a request out to the DB. For me, it turns out 90% of the value of an ORM is the query builder.
You appear to have entirely confused sqlx and diesel. You don't 'feel like' you're writing SQL in sqlx, you are writing SQL in sqlx.
sqlx doesn't build queries, or at least it minimally builds them. Which I think is the thing the OP is complaining about.
And, IMO, making dynamic queries harder is preferable. Dynamic queries are inherently unsafe. Sometimes necessary, however you have to start considering things like sql injection attacks with dynamic queries.
This isn't to poo poo sea-orm. I'm just saying that sqlx's design choice to make dynamic queries hard is a logical choice from a safety standpoint.
They didn't make them hard by design, I think, it's just the limitations of the current API and prioritisation. Dynamic queries are possible, just not trivial
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> And, IMO, making dynamic queries harder is preferable. Dynamic queries are inherently unsafe. Sometimes necessary, however you have to start considering things like sql injection attacks with dynamic queries.
Depends on what you mean by "dynamic query". You are dealing with injection attacks as soon as you start taking user input. Most useful user facing applications take user input.
In a simple case it might be "SELECT * FROM posts WHERE title LIKE '%hello world%', where "hello world" is a user specified string. This is easy with sqlx. Where things get more difficult is if you want to optionally add filters for things like date posted, score of the post, author, etc... That makes the query dynamic in a way that can't be solved by simply including a bind.
That's where sea-orm shines over sqlx IMO. sqlx will force you to do something like
```
let mut my_query = "SELECT * FROM posts WHERE title LIKE '%' + $1 + '%'";
let mut my_binds = vec![args.keyword];
if let Some(date) = args.date {
}
...
```
Your building a string and tracking binds. It gets messy. A good query builder like seaorm has lets you do something this:
```
let mut query = Posts::find().filter(Column::title::like(args.keyword));
if let Some(date) = args.date {
}
```
This pays off as your queries get more complicated. It pushes the string manipulation and bookkeeping into a library, which can be more thoroughly tested.
It also lets you pass around typed partial queries, eg in the example above query might be returned from a function, which helps you build more modular code.
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The TS/React ecosystem is so mature, it's hard for Rust to compete with it. My optimal stack is currently: Rust on the backend, Typescript/React for web with OpenAPI for shared types.
React and its ecosystem is a pile of garbage perpetuated by industry inertia. UseState, useMemo, useThisAndThat where you have to guess whether that dependency will cause a re-render? Or 20 different routers, state managers, query builders? I'm not even talking about html-in-ts with `!!a && (<div>...</div>)` A stodgy, bloated, overhyped and misused monstrosity, that's what React is.
useMemo is definitely a scourge on my existence. Doesn't help that a bunch of people write articles like "don't bother with it!!" when memoisation results can cause actual real bugs when integrating with a third party lib.
Unmounting and then remounting the same component is actually a bad thing when you lose your component state in the process. And when you have enough useEffect's in your system that's exactly what happens unless you're liberally sprinkling useMemo
Running rust in wasm works really well. I feel like I'm the world's biggest cheerleader for it, but I was just amazed at how well it works. The one annoying thing is using web APIs through rust - you can do it with web-sys and js-sys, but it's rarely as ergonomic as it is in javascript. I usually end up writing wrapper libraries that make it easy, sometimes even easier than javascript (e.g. in rust I can use weblocks with RAII)
It does work well logically but performance is pretty bad. I had a nontrivial Rust project running on Cloudflare Workers, and CPU time very often clocked 10-60ms per request. This is >50x what the equivalent JS worker probably would've clocked. And in that environment you pay for CPU time...
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Why not Angilar? React and Angular are not worth comparing directly, but why not use Angular for the web interface?
I'm doing this now and it's mostly great but the openapi generators are not good. At least the Typescript ones produce confusing function signatures and invalid type syntax in some cases.
I would assume today that maybe Dioxus or Leptos would be considered. Though that would be the "all in" approach on Rust front to back... it wouldn't really reduce some of the handling conditions levied in the article though.
I find C# can be a really good middle ground on the backend (not a blazor fan)... the syntax and expressiveness improves with every release. You can burrow as lot of patterns from the likes of Go as well as FP approaches. What I don't care for are excessively complex (ie: "Enterprise") environments where complexity is treated like a badge of honor instead of the burden of spaghetti that it is in practice.
Rust for Web is awesome for adding control interfaces etc to other programs who have a different primary purpose.
And even then I do it by serving JSON API's and not by serving HTML.
I looove Rust for the backend.
I've supported backends in typescript, python, Java, and Rust.
Rust pages me the least at night. Sleep is beautiful.
It's a throwaway comment in the article, but I feel it's important to push back on: HTML is very definitely a programming language, by any reasonable definition of "programming language".
Edit to add: It might not be an imperative language, but having written some HTML and asked the computer to interpret it, the computer now has a programmed capability, determined by what was written, that's repeatable and that was not available apart from the HTML given. QED.
HTML requires you to understand symbolic representations, where <> means something special. It is more verbose, but no more structurally complex, than Markdown. It does not require you to understand imperative dynamic logic. Getting the hang of symbolic representations is easy, and getting the hang of imperative programming is very hard and most people can't do it. That's why the dividing line is where it is. Making a static bulleted list isn't a 'capability' in HTML if you weren't thinking it was one in Markdown, and inventing your own precisely crafted definition with no purpose other than to include HTML then calling all others unreasonable doesn't convince anyone.
How would one do an if condition or enumerate a list in HTML alone? For that functionality you need another language to generate/manipulate the HTML.. not to mention interpreting HTML for display.
HTML is a markup language, it's even in the name... but it's not a complete programming language by any stretch.
It's not Turing-complete, and as you say, it's a markup language and it's not general purpose. But neither is a necessary component of "programming language".
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Please explain how your edit doesn't apply to a .txt file
agreed, it's a hill i am very willing to die on too.
So is Markdown a programming language? Any logic for html, is therefore Markdown as well.
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Rust shines in user-space systems-level applications (databases, cloud infrastructure, etc.) but definitely feels a bit out of place in more business-logic heavy applications.
Rust for web backends is such a weird choice.
Use a (statically typed) GC language for that.
> And the occasional struggles with typescript where the runtime seems to be changing too often; is it ts-node? tsx? tsm? The built-in typescript runtime in node? deno? bun?
This whole paragraph is so true. The last couple of years have been pretty rough in Node land.
rescript [https://rescript-lang.org/] would make a nice middle ground between rust and typescript
A fan of ML, and rescript looks lovely, but sadly typescript is good enough for UI work.
Well, yep. People underappreciate the Typescript/JS ecosystem.
Typescript is pretty type-safe, and it's perfectly integrated with hot code reload, debuggers, and all the usual tools. Adding transpilation in that flow only creates friction.
That's also why things like Blazor are going nowhere. C# is nicer than Typescript, but the additional friction of WASM roundtrips just eats all the advantage.
I think the big thing keeping Blazor back is that C# doesn't work well with WASM. It was built at a time when JIT-optimized languages with a larger runtime were in-vogue. That's fine in a lot of cases, but it means that C# isn't well suited for shipping a small amount of code over the wire to browsers. A Blazor payload is going to end up being over 4MB. If you use ahead of time compilation, that can balloon to 3x more. The fact that C# offers internal pointers makes it incompatible with the current WASM GC implementation.
Blazor performance is around 3x slower than React, it'll use 15-20x more RAM, and it's 20x larger over the wire. I think if Blazor could match React performance, it'd be quite popular. As it stands, it's hard to seriously consider it for something where users have other options.
Microsoft has been working to make C#/.NET better for AOT compilation, but it's tough. Java has been going through this too. I don't really know what state it's at, but (for example) when you have a lot of libraries doing runtime code generation, that's fine when you have a JIT compiler running the program. Any new code generated at runtime can be run and optimized like any other code that it's running.
People do underappreciate the JS/TS ecosystem, but I think there are other reasons holding back stuff running on WASM. With Blazor, performance, memory usage, and payload size are big issues. With Flutter and Compose Multiplatform, neither is giving you a normal HTML page and instead just renders onto a canvas. With Rust, projects like Dioxus are small and relatively new. And before WASM GC and the shared heap, there was always more overhead for anything doing DOM stuff. WASM GC is also pretty new - it's only been a little over a year since all the major browsers supported it. We're really in the infancy of other languages in the browser.
I feel like it was less than a year ago that Typescript was basically the only game in town and if you liked anything else you were a loon.
I have been an anti Typescript guy for a long time but I wouldn't deny for a moment that it's probably by far the most mature ecosystem.
IDK, I still miss Rust's strictness and exhaustive enum matching.
Enum matching is one of the better aspects of Rust.
I don't know about what other strictness you're referring to but exhaustive enum matching is common check in most TS stacks via eslint. Yea, it's not builtin, just saying there's a solution and it's super common.
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This is oddly timed in as much as one of the big success stories I've heard from a friend is their new practice of having Claude Code develop in Rust, than translate that to WebAssembly.
That seems much more like the future than embracing Node... <emoji here>
If you’re making a web app your fancy rust wasm module still has to interface with the dom, so you can’t escape that. Claude might offer you some fake simplicity on that front for awhile, but skeptical that’s it fully scalable
There are plenty of Rust frameworks that handle this interface for you, including calling Rust functions from JS and JS functions from Rust.
As someone who went in the opposite direction from Node to Rust, I feel like OP is just trading one set of problems for another set of substantially worse problems. I guess the grass is always greener in the other ecosystem ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Idk, it just feels like OP chose all the wrong approaches with Rust, including using a separate language and ecosystem for the frontend, which is where most of the friction comes from. For example, Dioxus is a React clone that is somehow leagues better than React (and Next.js, too), and it has hot-reloading that brings compiles down to subsecond times, which makes building UI with it just as productive as with Node / Vite etc. I use it for server side code as well and it's great. Compilation times can be an issue with Rust, it's something I miss from Go, but there are ways to improve on it, and just being smart about what deps you include, avoiding overuse of macros etc can make a difference. I know these things were not around when OP started using Rust for their application, but they are around now.
Node and TS are quite frankly inferior to Rust in most ways. Bad language, ecosystem full of buggy unmaintained packages with the worse security profile of all the common languages, no unified build tooling that seems to break your project every 6 months, constant churn of blessed frameworks and tools, an stdlib that is not much more comprehensive than Rust's and outright broken in some ways, at least three different approaches to modules (esm, commonjs, umd, and more...?), I could go on an on. There is a reason why everyone seemingly reinvents the wheel in that ecosystem over and over again -- the language and platform is fundamentally not capable of achieving peoples goals, and every solution developed comes with massive tradeoffs that the next iteration attempts to solve, but that just creates additional issues or regressions for future attempts to tackle.
I've been using Rust with Dioxus and was completely mind blown when I started with it. With barely knowing any Rust (just React) I was able to jump right in and build with it, somehow it was more intuitive to me than most modern JS full stack frameworks. It seemingly already has most if not all of the features that similar JS frameworks have been developing for years, and because it's written in Rust things like conditional compilation are built into the language instead of being a third party babel plugin. That helps to remove a ton of friction. And it's trivial to build those same apps for desktop and mobile as well, something that's basically not possible with the JS frameworks.
Even stuff like websockets, go try to implement a type safe web socket connection with a server and client in Next.js or Astro. You'll need a ws library, something like Zod for validation, etc. In Rust it's just:
I think this is spot on. I've used Iced and Dioxus and both are great. I do take the author's point that the actual UI code, even in Dioxus, is verbose. It is. And that's a trade off I'm willing to make for guaranteed correctness.
I haven't used Iced but re. Dioxus, I don't know if it's necessary more verbose conceptually. One of the most frustrating things with React is handling async updates, and while Rust's async story is conceptually difficult, it's ultimately much easier to reason about (imo). Like are we sure a comparable component in React would be any less verbose?
Imo the RSX here is much less verbose than JSX. Inline match statement, inline if statement, inline for loop, .take(3) compared to `Array.from({ length: 3 }).map((_, i) => urls[i]))`, etc etc. This gives you automatic cancellation of the future, whereas with React you would need a third party library like React Query, and then manually abort requests in the asynchronous function with an abort signal -- in Rust, you get that for free. You also get data validation for free, instead of needing eg. Zod for manual runtime validation.
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Long compiles are always going to be more friction. No project stays small and quick to compile forever. Get better hardware, and then one day the project is large enough that you're back with long compile times.
I run Rust/Axum for something that's less a web app and more a living system — autonomous agents, real-time state (pulse, mood, health metrics), a frontend that shifts based on internal conditions rather than just user input.
For this kind of use case, Rust's type system isn't overhead — it's the reason things stay coherent when multiple agents are running concurrently. The error handling that feels like boilerplate in a CRUD app actually matters when a missed unwrap means your system silently stops working at 3am.
The article reads to me like someone building a content site in Rust, which yeah, is painful for no reason. But I'd push back on the broader framing — the web is more than blogs and dashboards. When your backend does meaningful autonomous work beyond serializing JSON, Rust pays for itself.
This comment sounds like an AI wrote it.
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