Honestly those usecases described here shouldn’t have been done in js in the first place.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Look, I'm in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren't "make my website prettier!" feels very much like a bunch of "webmasters" dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren't looking and rebranding as "developers" whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.
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.
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.
Not all of the stdlib is written in C. Some parts cannot be Python because it’s critical code that needs to be as fast as possible.
Python is already slow for many use cases, if the standard lib was all built in Python it would be just too slow for much more use cases.
I didn't mean it's a bad choice !
But I think it's a good example of the compromise that has to be made here : what's the best fitting technology vs. how to ensure easy onboarding for future contributors.
Good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
JavaScript has its place as a lightweight runtime interpreter.
Rust has its place as a secure and modern way to engineer and produce dependable software.
Eh, it's not that lightweight, Lua is much better for that.
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The JS tooling universe has always seemed like a Lovecraftian hellscape to me. I've managed to stay away from it so far, but if I were caught in it, of course I'd be trying to escape any way I could. It sounds like Rust's attraction here has been as a viable escape corridor rather than anything about Rust per se.
In particular, I get that everyone wants their code to be faster, and I get that certain bloaty apps (browsers) need to get their memory footprint under control, and a few niche areas (OS kernels, realtime control) can't stand GC pauses. Other than that though, what is the attraction of Rust for stuff like tooling? As opposed to a (maybe hypothetical) compiled, GC'd language with a good type system and not too much abstraction inversion (Haskell's weakness, more or less).
Has Golang fizzled? It has struck me as too primitive, but basically on the right track.
Rust seems neat from a language geek perspective, but from what I can tell, it requires considerable effort from the programmer handle a problem (manual storage reclamation) that most programs don't really have. I do want to try it sometime. So the Rust question is intended as more inquisitive/head scratching rather than argumentative.
I think once you get into rust you just have a hard time going back, and it doesn't feel "hard" anymore. I can practically rust as easily as I can python for scripting and for API servers.
Rust really only gets hard when doing library development IMO. That's when you need lifetimes and well chosen types. But that's also why Rust libraries are superb.
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- Rust is the best language for writing WASM in, so you can write Rust and run it in the browser without transpiling to JS.
- Rust isn't just about speed or GC pauses. Its type system is amazing and allows you to encode things that you cannot in any other mainstream language.
- It's so incredibly well designed, it fewla like that clip from Ricky and Morty where Morty feels what standing on a truly even plane feels like then has a panic attack when he leaves. Rust rethought everything from scratch, and isn't just some new syntax or fancy compiler tricks. No null, no exceptions, no inheritance, new typing capabilities, etc.
Go made some pretty poor design choices, and now even Google is choosing Rust for a lot of stuff instead.
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I usually pick Rust for CLI tools because:
- It's statically compiled and isn't dependent on system binaries and won't break if there if the system has the wrong version like C/C++, allowing you to distribute it as a single binary without any other installation steps
- Still produces fairly small binaries unlike languages like Java or C# (because of the VM)
- Is a modern language with a good build system (It's like night and day compared to CMake)
- And I just like how the language works (errors as values etc.)
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Can we please go back to making programs for the target OS and skip the browser dependency?
Sure! Here! Electron.
[Screams internally]
Browsers have almost become the OS. At least in user land.
partly I agree, but then I would prefer to run those webapps confined in a web browser
Thank god.
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