Alon Zakai[1] gave a good talk[2] on the current state of WebAssembly, particularly on the current state of performance
Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
31–40 of 428 posts
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#32I 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. Trait…
When you're writing synchronous, single-threaded code like, say, a binary file parser or even an HTML scraper with blocking APIs, Rust is 1:1 with high level languages, and usually better.
Where Rust diverges is when you're doing async or multithreaded things with complicate lifetimes.
Getting things right from the start instead of solving them JIT as runtime issues pop up in production over the course of the year is Rust's wheelhouse. But even after using Rust for three years, I sometimes feel like I'm one requirement-change away from a problem I can't solve myself in Rust where I could solve it in a couple hours in another language.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#33[TypeScript] does not actually ensure that the data you are manipulating corresponds to the type that you have declared to represent it. For example, the data might contain additional fields or even incorrect values for declared types. This is only a problem if you are mixing untyped code with typed code, isn't it? Like when you are parsing JSON, you need to do typechecking right then, rather than just using an "any"…
That's correct. You have to insert validation code at all the entry points, which was the case for me.
Moving to Rust doesn't eliminate validation altogether, but you don't have to do any type related validation which is nice.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#34[TypeScript] does not actually ensure that the data you are manipulating corresponds to the type that you have declared to represent it. For example, the data might contain additional fields or even incorrect values for declared types. This is only a problem if you are mixing untyped code with typed code, isn't it? Like when you are parsing JSON, you need to do typechecking right then, rather than just using an "any"…
That's correct. You have to insert validation code at all the entry points, which was the case for me. Moving to Rust doesn't eliminate validation altogether, but you don't have to do any type related validation which is nice.
Not sure if this is a place to ask this but if someone does not have experience working with Javascript, they might have trouble reasoning about this code:
https://codesandbox.io/s/is849
edit: complete code
```typescript
class Person { id: number; name: string; yearOfBirth: number;
constructor(id: number, name: string, yearOfBirth: number) {
this.id = id;
this.name = name;
if (yearOfBirth 2020) {
throw new Error("I don't understand you. Go back to your time machine.");
} else {
this.yearOfBirth = yearOfBirth;
}
}
getAge(): number {
const currentDate: number = new Date().getUTCFullYear();
return currentDate - this.yearOfBirth;
}
class Dog { id: number; name: string; yearOfBirth: number;
constructor(id: number, name: string, yearOfBirth: number) {
this.id = id;
this.name = name;
if (yearOfBirth 2020) {
throw new Error("I don't understand you. Go back to your time machine.");
} else {
this.yearOfBirth = yearOfBirth;
}
}
getAge(): number {
const currentDate: number = new Date().getUTCFullYear();
return (currentDate - this.yearOfBirth) * 7;
}
const buzz: Person = new Person(1, `Buzz`, 1987);
const airbud: Dog = buzz;
console.log(`Buzz is ${buzz.getAge()} years old.`);
console.log(`Airbud is ${airbud.getAge()} years old in human years.`);
```
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#35Whenever I write Rust, I have a lot of fun, but I'm still not sold on it for most web dev. The analogy that comes to mind is that Rust is a really nice sports car with a great engine. It handles like a dream and you can feel the powerful engine humming while driving it. With the right open road, it's a great time. You can really optimize code, make great abstractions and work with data easily. Unfortunately, web dev…
Love the analogy!
I think there's value in mixing Rust with languages with mature libraries like JS/Python/etc to optimize performance critical code paths - basically for things we've been using C/C++ so far.
There's also a lot of progress in Rust community, I believe it'll get mature libraries very soon in future.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#36Whenever I write Rust, I have a lot of fun, but I'm still not sold on it for most web dev. The analogy that comes to mind is that Rust is a really nice sports car with a great engine. It handles like a dream and you can feel the powerful engine humming while driving it. With the right open road, it's a great time. You can really optimize code, make great abstractions and work with data easily. Unfortunately, web dev…
Yep, I don't think Rust is quite there yet for web dev. I didn't use Rust for any frontend interactions. The web app is an SPA written in Svelte. I only used it for the core state update logic, which benefits from the typing and performance boost.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Trait…
I'm a big Rust fan too. I have experience in all of the languages you've mentioned, and I'm most productive in Rust as well. It's funny you mention enums, there was just another thread last week where I brought up how crazy it is that sum types (Rust enums) and pattern matching have been around since the 70s but have largely been limited to the FP languages. After extensively using Rust for ~3 years now, I don't ever…
People often demand generics in Go. But I think that actual sum types would be a bigger boon (if I got to choose).
You can basically avoid interface{} in generic Go code with some copy and paste. But you can't really avoid it when you're trying to write code that would be cleaned up by an actual sum type.
Not to commit the predicable sin of comparing Rust to Go any time either is brought up. I just mean to +1 the idea that sum types should actually be a fundamental tool that we can reach for in every language. So weird that it's taking so long to go mainstream, so to speak.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#38A little disappointed not to see https://www.assemblyscript.org/ included in the discussion. Especially since it removes the "JavaScript is slower than WASM" argument.
I'm not quite sure what you mean here, because AssemblyScript compiles to WASM, not JS.
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#39Whenever I write Rust, I have a lot of fun, but I'm still not sold on it for most web dev. The analogy that comes to mind is that Rust is a really nice sports car with a great engine. It handles like a dream and you can feel the powerful engine humming while driving it. With the right open road, it's a great time. You can really optimize code, make great abstractions and work with data easily. Unfortunately, web dev…
Yep, I don't think Rust is quite there yet for web dev. I didn't use Rust for any frontend interactions. The web app is an SPA written in Svelte. I only used it for the core state update logic, which benefits from the typing and performance boost.
Yep! You found a really great open road to drive Rust. I'm jealous :D. If I had an app with as interesting requirements, I'd certainly consider your approach
Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's correct. You have to insert validation code at all the entry points, which was the case for me. Moving to Rust doesn't eliminate validation altogether, but you don't have to do any type related validation which is nice.
Not sure if this is a place to ask this but if someone does not have experience working with Javascript, they might have trouble reasoning about this code: https://codesandbox.io/s/is849 edit: complete code ```typescript class Person { id: number; name: string; yearOfBirth: number; constructor(id: number, name: string, yearOfBirth: number) { this.id = id; this.name = name; if (yearOfBirth 2020) { throw new Error("I d…
What’s confusing? I must’ve missed it in my cursory scan.