> Webassembly Is Faster Than Javascript
Just curious, how's the OP measuring this? Also, would be very interested in the stack - is OP using Yew/Seed/etc or server rendered pages with Rust?
Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
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Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on what you're optimizing for. If you want memory efficiency and near-native speeds, then you need WebAssembly. And Rust is a fantastic source language to compile to WebAssembly because of its memory safety.
Mind explaining a bit more here why Rust is a particularly good language to compile to wasm? Why does memory safety help here? Asking out of ignorance!
There aren’t very many good wasm options that will produce web-friendly binary sizes. The options are really c/c++, rust, and some other less-supported languages like Zig and Nim. Rust has a good mix of high-level constructs (making it more productive than C) and has a good ecosystem around it. Cross compiling is never easy, and the rust wasm story is arguably the best and most supported via wasm-bindgen.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#13I don’t know Rust and haven’t done JavaScript for years but isn’t JavaScript a bit more of a higher level language, which would make a developer more productive? Rust being closer to the hardware should require more code, and effort, to accomplish the same task.
Rust’s type system is sound, unlike TypeScript, and Rust provides a lot more performance by default. You can get good performance out of JavaScript, but it can be difficult, and the code can end up being difficult to maintain.
If you’re trying to right very fast, very correct code in JavaScript/TypeScript then Rust may be more productive.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on what you're optimizing for. If you want memory efficiency and near-native speeds, then you need WebAssembly. And Rust is a fantastic source language to compile to WebAssembly because of its memory safety.
Mind explaining a bit more here why Rust is a particularly good language to compile to wasm? Why does memory safety help here? Asking out of ignorance!
WASM doesn’t have a garbage collector built in. Languages that use a garbage collector have to also convert their language runtime into WASM which can dramatically increase the WASM file sizes and is more work to process by the browser. Since rust doesn’t have a garbage collector this should make its WASM files smaller and more performant
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#15ok
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#16I don’t know Rust and haven’t done JavaScript for years but isn’t JavaScript a bit more of a higher level language, which would make a developer more productive? Rust being closer to the hardware should require more code, and effort, to accomplish the same task.
> isn’t JavaScript a bit more of a higher level language
Rust has zero-cost abstractions that feel like using Ruby and a rich type system that makes it incredibly expressive. Working in other languages feels like going back to assembly.
I wouldn't want to design state machines in any other language. Rust's enums make it feel smooth as butter. They're a killer app. (The whole ecosystem is. Cargo. Package naming. Traits. So much good stuff.)
Rust is my most productive language now, and I work in Python, Java, and Typescript codebases frequently.
Edit: I'm being downvoted for expressing preference? What's with all the Rust hate? Learn it instead of being a hater. It's a wonderful tool, and it's silly to dismiss because you think people are being hipsters or something. There's a reason people love it.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#17I would like to get started with Rust & Game Development. Any resources for that?
https://arewegameyet.rs/
Rust is not really there yet for game development, in my opinion. Amethyst is probably the most advanced 3D engine at the moment, but they are having some issues with picking an ECS implementation, and it's still very young.
There are a few 2D engines, but they are also not particularly mature either. Coffee looks interesting, although I haven't tried it.
For something lower-level, there's gfx.rs (Amethyst uses this), which is quite impressive. gfx-hal is quite nice for abstracting over DirectX/Vulkan/OpenGL/Metal/etc.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#18I would like to get started with Rust & Game Development. Any resources for that?
[deleted]
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#19I don’t know Rust and haven’t done JavaScript for years but isn’t JavaScript a bit more of a higher level language, which would make a developer more productive? Rust being closer to the hardware should require more code, and effort, to accomplish the same task.
This is complicated. I’m no expert with WASM, but I’m fairly familiar with Rust and have toyed around with Rust and WASM.
With Rust and WASM you pay an expense of FFI between the languages. There are tools that minimize this, but there’s still a cost. Transferring data is limited to very primitive data types today, which adds a cost to translation between Rust and JS. I expect this to reduce in cost as WASM gains abilities to access the DOM and such, but it is overhead. This generally means that for many things Rust is not much faster than JS, but it is for very hot loops over CPU bound computations.
As to productivity. This debate between languages will never end. JS like Python and other interpreted languages give the impression that tasks are being accomplished, but until all code paths are tested, knowing if it is correct is not obvious.
Rust like many other typesafe languages (and it’s definitely on the further end of type safe) allow the compiler to detect errors in usage at compile time, well before testing and production usage. Some of us consider this to be more “productive” as it reduces the overall maintenance of the program after it’s released, but YMMV.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#20As long as you use a language with a good, static type system, I don't care so much what you use. TypeScript or Rust, for all I care you can transpile Haskell into JavaScript if you feel adventurous. But don't use a dynamically typed language as the source language for anything that is supposed to be more than a simple script.