Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. And now with AI, it will get even worse. I think the web truly needs a reset.
The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
#32Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. And now with AI, it will get even worse. I think the web truly needs a reset.
Improving speed is now overengineering apparently, but the same people would complain about how horrible web dev is if it weren't improved. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
#33Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. And now with AI, it will get even worse. I think the web truly needs a reset.
Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering.
Imagine you wanted to make a native desktop app that runs on Windows (going back to Windows 95), and OSX, and Linux, and have it use the end users choice of native components, QT, or GTK. It also has to load fast, be accessible, and work on desktop, laptop, and phones. Also, you're only allowed to ship a single binary but you can load in assets based on the device when it runs.
The app could be anything from a single page that renders one image up to a complete 3D game. Users want 60FPS regardless of what it is.
I reckon you'd end up with a relatively complicated build pipeline.
That's what webdev is today.
Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
#34Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. And now with AI, it will get even worse. I think the web truly needs a reset.
There's lots of overengineered bollocks in webdev, but this is not one of those pieces.
Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
#35Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. And now with AI, it will get even worse. I think the web truly needs a reset.
Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. Imagine you wanted to make a native desktop app that runs on Windows (going back to Windows 95), and OSX, and Linux, and have it use the end users choice of native components, QT, or GTK. It also has to load fast, be accessible, and work on desktop, laptop, and phones. Also, you're only allowed to ship a single binary but you can load in assets based on the device when it r…
Thats not a true comparison, MAYBE that was sort of a thing back in the IE6 era. Today the web is capable of "a good enough" UX for most things. But how we do interactive apps on the web today is just madness. Most sites dont need anything close to React, and those who do could have just used something more simple without the madness what is the react ecosystem / bundlers / packages etc.
Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. Imagine you wanted to make a native desktop app that runs on Windows (going back to Windows 95), and OSX, and Linux, and have it use the end users choice of native components, QT, or GTK. It also has to load fast, be accessible, and work on desktop, laptop, and phones. Also, you're only allowed to ship a single binary but you can load in assets based on the device when it r…
Thats not a true comparison, MAYBE that was sort of a thing back in the IE6 era. Today the web is capable of "a good enough" UX for most things. But how we do interactive apps on the web today is just madness. Most sites dont need anything close to React, and those who do could have just used something more simple without the madness what is the react ecosystem / bundlers / packages etc.
The best non-web analogy I can think of is when someone builds a 2D platformer in Unreal Engine. The complexity of the tooling is necessary because someone else is making Witcher 4 in it. The fact the 2D platformer is using a vastly more complicated tool than necessary is on the dev, not the tool.
It's not React's fault that some devs don't know how to make a form in HTML. There is an argument that React doesn't spend much time telling people they might not need it, but that's not really their responsibility, plus there are some things (reactivity to other things on the page) that are common enough that seeing the boundary where you do or don't need it is actually quite hard.
Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
#37Eventually we will be back to pre-node days, when compiled languages were the majority for JS tooling (C, C++, Java, C#,...), the yin yang of cool technology cycles.
Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
#38Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. And now with AI, it will get even worse. I think the web truly needs a reset.
Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. Imagine you wanted to make a native desktop app that runs on Windows (going back to Windows 95), and OSX, and Linux, and have it use the end users choice of native components, QT, or GTK. It also has to load fast, be accessible, and work on desktop, laptop, and phones. Also, you're only allowed to ship a single binary but you can load in assets based on the device when it r…
I think you'd just end up with WxWidgets. Because it can do all of that.
Most of the jank of the modern platform doesn't come from JavaScript - it comes frame dependency hell, framework layered over framework, and over abstraction. It is a _cultural_ problem, rather than a technical one.
Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s just the best thing ever. Compiling at work took a minute for full builds with babel, and with rsbuild it now takes about 0.9 seconds.
Rust is such an awesome language. The execution times are blazing fast.
I just wish Rust itself compiled faster. Serde, proc macros, it's all so slow.
I'm going to start prototyping systems in Go, then porting them to Rust when they're more concrete.
I feel as though the Rust code LLMs emit is generally higher quality than most other languages, perhaps due to the error handling being a chief concern of the language, but the iteration on making changes and running tests is so slow.
Rust could grow into "the final language" if it wasn't so slow to compile. Assuming the WASM bridge also continues to improve.
Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats not a true comparison, MAYBE that was sort of a thing back in the IE6 era. Today the web is capable of "a good enough" UX for most things. But how we do interactive apps on the web today is just madness. Most sites dont need anything close to React, and those who do could have just used something more simple without the madness what is the react ecosystem / bundlers / packages etc.
The best non-web analogy I can think of is when someone builds a 2D platformer in Unreal Engine. The complexity of the tooling is necessary because someone else is making Witcher 4 in it. The fact the 2D platformer is using a vastly more complicated tool than necessary is on the dev, not the tool. It's not React's fault that some devs don't know how to make a form in HTML. There is an argument that React doesn't spen…
in defence of using ue5 for a 2d platformer, you still get a ton of features to help you build out the platformer, cross platform support, and you can reuse your knowledge across projects.
it's kind of the same for react. yes you could build one thing in vanilla js, another thing with htmx, and then a third in react. or just build all three in react and be done with it.
modern web dev is actually pretty simple now, there is still a stigma around webdev from the olden days but spinning up vite + react is trivial, doesn't pull a ton of dependencies, and makes it easy to build anything you want. yes you can still overcomplicate it massively but that's on the dev at that point.