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The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

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Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

#41

Post by slopinthebag »

shikck200 wrote: post #31

Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. And now with AI, it will get even worse. I think the web truly needs a reset.

it's not really. you have javascript, you have a library like react which has a code transformer written in rust, you have vite which orchestrates the build process, and...?

if anything the migration of all these tools to rust makes things way less complicated. you have a binary for compiling your react code (totally optional btw, it's a performance optimisation), a cli for building your app (vite, built on a rust binary basically), and react itself which is virtually dependency free. where is the over engineering here?

Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

#42

Post by mexicocitinluez »

shikck200 wrote: post #35
onion2k wrote: post #33

Earlier 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.

Its 2026. You thinking you know more about other people's requirements in an absolutely enormous field is just plain naive and its embarrassing reading this stuff on HN.

Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

#43

Post by torginus »

koito17 wrote: post #27
adzm wrote: post #4

No more babel in my compilation pipeline, yay!

Finally got rid of Webpack in 2022, and now I'll be able to get rid of Babel, too. It's a bit mesmerizing to think that Vite at the time was still "that newish tool the Vue folk use", and now it's pretty much the standard bundler for web frontend. Also the easiest one to configure and use (in my experience). Similarly, I'm glad I don't have to deal with karma, jest, etc. anymore.

I really haven't invested heavily in understanding new tooling, but I did try to move to TS 7.0 and found that a lot of the tooling actually relies on parsing TS not just stripping the types. And the only tool that can do that reliably is `tsc`.

I even had to revert from TS 7.0 (the go rewrite) to 6, because 7 doesn't support plugins and code analysis stuff (which I guess are js) in the way the tooling requires.

Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

#44

Post by [deleted] »

shakna wrote: post #38
onion2k wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

#45

Post by _bent »

onion2k wrote: post #33
shikck200 wrote: post #31

Webdev 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…

not only does it have to load fast, it has to _stream_ the content from the server to the client

Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

#46

Post by throw-the-towel »

echelon wrote: post #39
fishfasell wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

LLMs being good with Rust makes sense, because the language itself gives you more safeguards than many others. What's good for the (human) gander is good for the (agent) goose.

Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

#48

Post by throw_m239339 »

BretonForearm wrote: post #24

What's a react compiler? Not JS or TS?

Hand written React code is relatively slow when running so the React team made a React compiler to make it run faster. You might not see the difference with a toy app, but with a fairly large app, with a lot of IO it's a catastrophe if not compiled and optimized.

It's the definition of overengineering IMHO. The problem is React at first place. Some other frameworks have in theory no compilation or optimization step while delivering constant performance as the app grows, like SolidJS. Since writing a compiler in JS also make compilation itself slow, then the React compiler was re-written in Rust...

At the end of the day, React has a larger community and ecosystem so it's the industry "standard" for JS applications...

Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

#49

Post by throw_m239339 »

shikck200 wrote: post #31

Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. And now with AI, it will get even worse. I think the web truly needs a reset.

*React. Nobody is forced to use React to write web UI though. Actually, in theory, AI helps getting rid of all these web frameworks, they are tools for made developers, LLM don't need React to code a web UI, they can use Vanilla DOM or faster frameworks, like SolidJS.

Re: The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite

#50

Post by throw_m239339 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #32
shikck200 wrote: post #31

Webdev 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.

But bad performances stems from non compiler optimized React to begin with, its execution model when handwritten. Other frameworks don't necessarily take more effort to use and have better performances from the get go.
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