Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly(nicolodavis.com) |
Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly(nicolodavis.com) |
Comparing the two languages, I would say that Rust's enums and pattern matching make it easier to work with for my specific use case.
Can you give an example?
This is just cargo-culting static typing: "If I avoid dynamic typing at all cost, the cargo crates will surely rain on down!"
You'll find that picking a language is more of a business decision than the sort of technical static-vs-dynamic checkbox test you might use to pick the language of your next weekendware.
This kind of absolutist rule of thumb is more flame bait than morsel of wisdom.
If a company is small and/or has to rely on freelancers it goes with dynamically typed languages (PHP, Node, Ruby, Python and Elixir) because that's what the bulk of freelancers use.
If they have many internal developers or use big consultancy firms they go with Java or C#.
Of course there are exceptions (I know a few of them) and my point of view can be biased because I use to see projects and developers of dynamically typed languages.
But I know a few small companies with a code base in Java that had a hard time at finding Java freelancers. Almost all of them are employees, unreachable for them.
This is a forum for engineers (not only, I know), who collectively will at least have a large part in steering what languages are considered common in future.
I was a diehard fan of dynamic languages for a decade, but eventually I saw the light.
I still use dynamic languages daily, but the bigger the project the more I want proper static typing. None of that mypy stuff, the real deal.
I will say from exp. that @anyfoo has a point. In the end, even webapp backends are clients, worker nodes within a much larger system infra. Anything that has to do with data that isn't a pass-through entity ideally should be both strongly and statically typed.
Want an easy concrete example? You and your cofounder have 10 years of Ruby experience and investors/customers who want a product yesterday. Or the deliverable that makes most sense is a PHP script that users can drag into CPanel because that's your customer base.
The tinkerer inside you always wants to try new things and convince you that some greener tech on the other side of the fence are going to make the difference. It's usually just procrastination from the actual hard stuff: building things people want, today.
True but facile. Sure, for every imaginable technology, there is a conceivable scenario in which that technology is the right choice. Doesn't mean there's no such thing as a good or bad technology.
> The tinkerer inside you always wants to try new things and convince you that some greener tech on the other side of the fence are going to make the difference. It's usually just procrastination from the actual hard stuff: building things people want, today.
That's actually an argument for being more absolutist about the technical side: you're unlikely to be in the obscure circumstances where a dynamic language would actually be helpful, and even more unlikely to have that be more important than your business decision. So rather than carefully considering your circumstances and weighing up the tradeoffs, it's better to follow the consensus for what's a good general-purpose language (which these days means a statically typed language) and get on with building your business.
I'm sorry, but cleaning your windows with Windex instead of tap water is then "not any better if business trade-offs make tap water better". I am just not sure what you are arguing for: Static typing is better, except for when you don't have static typing?
Some folks here are in the position to choose their current, or shape a collective future landscape, and for those static typing is a consideration.
You mention PHP a few times, but I think this is actually a good example for something that has been pushed away in favor of better things. My impression is that at least the bigger software corporations have moved away from PHP if they ever used it to begin with. Even Facebook, one of PHP's biggest users, replaced it with their own so-named "Hack" eventually, which is apparently a PHP-derivate with "both dynamic typing and static typing" according to Wikipedia.
I have a 20k LOC distributed system, 40k if you include all the libraries I've written for it, running in prod, written in a (typechecked) dynamic language, and it's fine. I had very few typing errors in dev, and one typing error that I pushed to prod. Even this had no discernible customer effect. I discovered it months later when I was checking over my logs understand logical errors. Currently all of the reported errors are race conditions on startup (and sporadic network errors). But it's fine. The system tolerates it, and restarts the failing modules, instead of being pedantic, and so instead of spending weeks debugging concurrent startup, I get a no-hassle fast booting system (which also means nonblocking bootup and thus higher customer availability during failure and restart). The other nice thing about dynamic systems, is that if they're not otherwise terrible, (logical) debugging is a breeze, because all types are inspectable and I don't have to worry about implementing observerability hooks for every single datatype. I can just look at the data as it moves through my system. And that also means that telemetry and logging with structured metadata just "happens", and is highly composable with no hassle.
I guess my biggest problem with static typing absolutism is that it leads to this attitude that code can be correct. It can't. Even if it's provably correct (in the mathematical sense), if your axioms are violated by your system then your system can wind up in an undefined state. You must plan for failure. And sometimes the most efficent/effective plan is "do nothing".
Yes, and if your hardware is broken or a cosmic ray hits your system in just a bad way, then all the static type checking in the world won't help against that. But that's a different problem to solve, isn't it?
I'd postulate that for most applications, you'd usually be happy to have a software stack that's less likely to contain programming bugs in the first place. It's also true that you don't want faulty Airbag software in your car to affect your steering, but don't you want non-faulty Airbag software as well?
You still drive value based on how much of the correctness checking you can offload to the compiler.
I don't really get why programmers better than anyone understand the value of automating work with a computer, but fail to grasp that value applied to their own craft. Let the computer do more of the work in making sure your program is correct.
After seeing how much I got wrong in Python (but apparently worked) I realized I couldn’t really trust myself (even after a decade in Python!)
Here is a comment from 9 years ago. It sounds like parody to me and demonstrates how echo chambers eventually deviate from reality. HN can often be an echo chamber
> A good programmer should wake up at 6 am in the morning get a solid 2.5hrs of coding done by 8:30 am, at 8:30 leave for work, work till 6 (it goes without saying that the lunchbreak must be spent trying to learn the Haskell or if you are feeling lazy answering questions on stackoverflow). Commute from 6 to 6:30 (it's a bonus if you listen to a technical podcast during this time and no stuff like TWIT does not count, perhaps audio lectures from the Advanced Algorithms course on MIT OCW). 6:30 to 7:00 time for supper and excellent time to catchup on r/programming and hackernews. 7-8:30pm is the time for relaxation by doing some recreational mathematics, doing problems from project Euler and that proof from The Art of Computer Programming excercises which you have been itching to get a go at! 8:30pm to 1 am code contribute to that open-source project, write patches for the Linux kernal and continue working on your startup.
> Anyone who does less programming that what is mentioned above cannot call himself a "good programmer", I would have serious reservations in calling that person even a mediocre programmer.
--
It is a parody, isn't it?
I don't use technical recommendations from HN users because they consistently underestimate pragmatic concerns because the HN echo chamber overvalues technical virtuosity so real world pragmatic concerns get drowned out by other voices.
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 generally isn't a wide open road. It's a lot of little turns and alleys and special cases. Driving Rust in web dev is a lot of accelerating only to screech to a halt. I wrote a backend API for a side project in Rust. And true to what I said, Rust handled like a dream. But I didn't need the power. I spent most of my time screeching to a halt worrying about the plumbing between the various immature Rust libraries. And that's on the backend, which is way more mature compared to the frontend Rust libraries.
Judging by this post, OP managed to find a great open road in web dev to use Rust. I only wish I could find one as worthwhile.
PHP has long been a meme and is mostly legacy stuff or bottom tier work.
Dynamic languages are adding static optional static typing because the value provided by tooling as the projects scales is undeniable.
It took ES6/TypeScript to drag JS out of the dump that it was with every library adding its own take on a class system - the maintainability jump from ES5 to TS is incomparable for anything larger than 1k LOC
The issue here is with Rust: its strengths are mostly irrelevant for the web and its weaknesses (particularly slow development compared to the competition because of having to pacify the type checker) are really important.
Op is painstakingly beating around the bush, but what they're getting at is that Rust + webdev = mismatch.
It really doesn't.
Languages like PHP and Ruby "have won out" over statically typed languages because the representatives of statically typed languages at the time were Java and C++, both of which were bad (they still are, but they were): verbose, difficult (and verbose) to leverage for type-safety, missing a bunch of tremendously useful pieces (type-safe enums to say nothing of full-blown sum types), nulls galore, …
As a result, the gain in expressiveness and terseness (even without trying to code-golf) of dynamically typed languages was huge, the loss in type-safety was very limited given the choice was "avoid leveraging the type system" or "write reams of code because the language is shit", and the fast increase in compute performances more than compensated for the language's loss in efficiency.
And that's before talking about the horror show that Java's web frameworks ecosystem was circa 2006.
> Languages that tend to work well with it are those that are highly flexible around the corner cases of these technologies, and allow you to quickly iterate through the process of gluing them together.
That's really complete hogwash outside of the client, which isn't what we're talking about here since neither php nor ruby run there. On the server you have clear interfaces between "inside" and "outside", and there's no inflexibility to properly taking care of cleaning up your crap at the edges. Quite the opposite, really.
PHP is highly to blame. PHP, being a scripting language, is easy to deploy and keeps chugging along at all costs. It may do something nonsensical, but it will try to chug along to completion without aborting. It creates a system where it is easy to write and deploy something that usually works.
So I think typing has its merits and languages like Typescript really make development safer and code easier to understand, while still making it possible to write and interface with untyped code if necessary.
Real reason is lowering the bar of entry, and that explains why web is horribly broken.
The "bootcamp webshit" meme exists for a reason. That's not gatekeeping - lowering the bar to entry below a certain level leads to drastic decrease in quality.
Every time you write logic in your code, your brain is aware that the logic is dealing with a specific type. Writing a type signature on top of that is just additional instructions to the compiler about the type you have already specified in your logic. It is a minor inconvenience.
There are many reasons why Ruby and PHP won out. One of the reasons is many people misunderstand the power and flexibility of types. Once they understand this, they will know there is really no trade off between statically typed and dynamically typed. Statically typed languages are infinitely better and the only downside is a minor inconvenience.
First off, note that there is only one function in the universe that can really take every single type in existence and that function is shown below:
-- haskell
identity :: x -> x
identity x = x
# python
def identity(x: Any) -> Any:
return x
The above example have no logic to specify a type... The minute you start to add any logic to your function immediately your function becomes bounded by a type. Let's say I simply want to add one in my identity function.
-- haskell
identity :: Int -> Int
identity x + 1 = x + 1
# python
def identity(x: Int) -> Int:
return x + 1
Let's say I want to do garbage code like write a function that handles an Int or a String? That can be typed as well....
--haskell
type IntOrString = Number Int | Characters String
func :: IntOrString -> IntOrString
func Number n = n + 1
func Characters n = n ++ "1"
#python
IntOrString = Union[str, int]
def func(n: IntOrString) -> IntOrString:
if isinstance(n, int):
return n + 1
if isinstance(n, str):
return n + "1"
-- haskell
type JSON = Number Float | Characters String | Array [JSON] | Map String JSON
func :: JSON -> JSON
func Array x = x ++ [1.0]
func x = x
-- python
JSON = Union[float, str, List["JSON"], Dict[str, "JSON"]]
def func(x: JSON) -> JSON:
if isinstance(x, list):
return x + [1.0]
else:
return x
One caveat to note here (and this is specific to haskell) is lack of interfaces specific to record types. I cannot specify a type that represents every single record that contains at least a property named x with a type of int.
I prefer a different analogy:
Rust is high-end automated industrial equipment for machining high-precision metal parts that will fit perfectly with each other and which you can use to build anything you want, with high confidence that it will work and last a long time. But if you're under pressure to build lots of small, partially documented, constantly changing parts every day, you might be better off using more flexible equipment and materials (balsa wood, bailing wire, masking tape, etc.) to get the job done, even if the result will be messier and more prone to breaking.
And we need more of our software to be like that. Now if we could just do something about the constant pressure to compromise.
Python & Deno/Node fit the bill for the latter category. Would you consider Julia in the former or latter category for ML use-cases?
JavaScript is cheaper to get started but becomes way more expensive to maintain. My Rust code on the other hand: Once it works it keeps working. If it compile it probably won't bug down the road.
I'd switch to Rust / WebAssembly once the libraries are mature/stable/documented enough. The overhead cost is worth it in the long run.
I think this is assumption is a bit too broad. There is another side of this:
In JS you write less code than in Rust and there is less explicit coupling in a dynamic codebase. So changes tend to be smaller and faster as well.
For example if you pass a top-level data-structure X through A, B... and C but only C cares about some part Z. Then you change how Z is produced in A and consumed in C.
If you are dynamic you just do exactly that, which is actually just fine. In a static language you have to change all the B's. Or you take the time and write a sensible abstraction over Z or X so in the future you don't have to change the B's anymore, which is better, but ultimately less readable and more complex.
Stuff that is well understood and specified in advance suits a language like Rust better. You get all these runtime guarantees and performance. You get all this expressive (but explicit!) power to fine-tune abstractions and performance. It's great.
But the closer you get to a UI (especially GUI) and non-technical, direct(!) users, the more dynamic you want to be. Because in this context you are more of a human to computer translator: requirements get discovered via iterations, interactions need to be tested and evolve etc.
I mean it works but I don't understand why I would go to the bother of thinking about lifetimes when it seems performance would be similar to Kotlin / Swift / F#.
The long answer probably includes GATs (generic associated types), and the even longer answer starts with the amazing work that Nico et al. does to reinvent the internals of the Rust type checker. (Basically - if I remember correctly - the compiler team is currently refactoring big parts of rustc, to librarify the type checker, and replace it with a PROLOG-ish library called "chalk", which is able to prove more things, so it allows better handling of GATs, so it allows better handling of async, where you get "impl Future<Output = T>"-s everywhere.
But also somewhere there is that the ergonomics of async/.await are still not very much in progress too. With better error messages people will be able to forego Box<>-ing and figure out what to use instead, and only heap allocate where they must.
It's possible to write low-level async code with hand rolled-polled Futures, and push/manage as much stuff on the stack as possible. But ... that takes time, and performance is already "good enough". (And/or probably there are bigger gains in performance in other areas, such as scheduling.)
And, finally, boxing helps with compile times. (Because it's basically trivial for the compile to prove that a heap allocated simple trait object behaves well compared to a stack allocated concrete, but usually highly complex (plus unnameable) type.)
My bet is people choose to allocate heavily rather than figure out how to share memory correctly with Rust. I need to learn more rust to get a hang of it so I don't allocate so much.
Are there any rust folks who have a great "list of memory management models for rust"?
The only place that the langs you mention probably win is: learning curve (F# maybe not so much) a.k.a. getting language illiterate people up to speed, and compile times.
One topic OP hasn't touched upon is the disadvantage of "pushing client side to the server". JS is terrible at handling concurrent processes. The browsers have been able to make do because they typically care about just one user.
In the server though, it's terribly important to handle thousands of users concurrently. JS engines suck at it.
To put it in plain words, if you are into SPAs and want server side rendering, among all the other issues the one sure wall you'd be hitting is scaling issues.
JS will never be able to construct and send HTML over as efficiently as Rust could. This is going to be the reason why Rust(or a similar tech) will eventually win the web.
A clean static rendering system with caching, built on top of react / svelte / whatever performs well enough for almost everyone. And every year cpu costs drop, V8 gets faster and JS libraries get a little bit more mature.
I love rust, but I don’t see it displacing nodejs any time soon. Maybe when websites can be 100% wasm and the rust web framework ecosystem matures some more. Fingers crossed, but I’m not holding my breath.
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.
Everyone says this, but I would dispute it as misleading in a lot of cases. I've been experimenting a lot with wasm lately. Yes, it is faster than javascript, but not by all that much.
It's the speed of generic 32 bit C. It leaves a lot to be desired in the way of performance. My crypto library, when compiled to web assembly, is maybe 2-3x the speed of the equivalent javascript code. Keep in mind this library is doing integer arithmetic, and fast integer arithmetic does not explicitly exist in javascript -- JS is at a _huge_ disadvantage here and is still producing comparable numbers to WASM.
This same library is maybe 15 or 16 times faster than JS when compiled natively, as it is able to utilize 128 bit arithmetic, SIMD, inline asm, and so on.
Maybe once WASM implementations are optimized more the situation will be different, but I am completely unimpressed with the speed of WASM at the moment.
Here are my two (or more) cents:
1 - Javascript is fast enough for your use case. No one will notice the difference in a board game website.
2 - AI should probably be implemented in python anyway. As ugly as python can be, you shouldn't fight the world; there are too many free advanced AI algo implementations in python out there.
3 - Regarding "Limitations of TypeScript" (strict typing / data validation / error handling): first of all arguable claims, but moreover, even if you think rust is better in these concerns, they are not important enough to justify reimplementation, disregarding away typescript's advantages and taking the risk involved in a new language and toolset. Yes, I can see the appeal as a programmer to learn new stuff, but seriously you should have much better reasons to rewrite existing code.
BTW, also, if I would think of a rewrite, I would have gone with scala or python, both are slower on the web, but seriously, it will not amount to anything meaningful in your use-case. Scala has better typing, and contextual abstraction is a killer feature for DSLs like game mechanics specification. Python is the lingua franca of AI, and pypy has greenlets [1]! Which is much cooler than people seem to realize. Specifically, it should allow writing immutable redux-like command pattern operations, as regular code, without the weird switches everywhere.
BTW2, I've contributed to boardgame.io, please consider staying with open source. We can build something like boardgame-lab together.
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" type. The only other situation I have run into this in practice with TypeScript is when I'm using a library that has slightly misdefined types.
Rust being closer to the hardware should require more code, and effort, to accomplish the same task.
LLVM as a toolchain provides backends for many target machines, so as a compiler author you can just emit LLVM IR and (mostly)automatically be able to compile for x86, arm, mips, etc... And they have a wasm backend too, so the technologies are complementary -- you can use LLVM to compile to wasm. LLVM will do a fair bit of optimization too. The intent with LLVM is not to provide a portable binary distribution format, but to allow different compiler frontends to all share the same compiler backend logic.
By contrast, with WASM the assumption is that by the time it gets to the browser the ahead-of-time compiler has already done a fair bit of optimization, so what a wasm compiler has to do is much simpler.
WASM is also designed for space efficiency, since the code will be shipped over the network, and safety -- LLVM has a C-like notion of undefined behavior (which the optimizer makes use of), but this would be wildly inappropriate for WASM due to security (and portability) concerns.
When this transition period goes away, LLVM should hopefully compile to WASM binary as a target. The current path described in the video of WASM -> C -> clang -> llvm -> native-binary is a temporary workaround afaik.
Typescript is, for me, the right balance between the strictness required to manage a mid-size codebase, and the looseness necessary to be productive (I definitely don't want to manage low-level things like memory when coding the gameplay of the board game).
On top of that, if your project is open-source, using JS/TS makes it more likely that someone can contribute to the project, compared to Rust, which has a higher learning curve.
Being able to easily share code between the client and the server is a big bonus too. The article points that with WebAssembly, it's possible to do it with any language, but I'm not sure it's stable enough to be used yet.
I'm thinking of making a library similar to boardgame.io (because I think there are some parts that could be done better), and I'll most probably keep Typescript for it.
Curious to see how using Rust for this will play out!
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?
About measurements, I just whipped up a quick benchmark comparing the JavaScript state updates with the WASM version. You do pay a cost crossing the JS / WASM boundary, but the WASM version is faster overall for my application. I'm not particularly concerned with performance at the moment (it was just a nice to have).
io-ts [0] completely solves this issue, to the point where I don't think it's less type-safe than Rust in any practical manner. I've been writing apps in TS this way for the past year and I have quite a large codebase in production. The errors you mention do not happen.
Even though I acknowledge it solves some problems I'd like to solve, if I put code using this library infront of a junior developer, they'd be paralaysed, and at best, if they weren't, write code with it that another junior wouldn't understand. That makes it difficult for me to justify introducing it.
> Can you call Rust from JS and JS from Rust?
Yes.
I personally have written some JS code that returns a promise, wrapped in wasm that turned it into a Rust Future, then converted that Future into a promise that I've returned to Javascript.
> If you go JS->Rust->JS->Rust->JS and the innermost JS function throws an exception, is all that properly propagated up the stack?
Sort of. Rust doesn't use exceptions, but the binding converts a JavaScript exception to a Rust "result" type and vice versa at the boundary, so if you propogate it, it will get properly propagated.
I use TypeScript / Svelte for DOM interactions and only call into Rust code for the state updates (treating it like a black box).
Most developers, at least in my experience see just plain Array and JSON. If they get themselves familiar with API like WeakRef (WeakSet/WeakMap), ArrayBuffer along with DataView and Various Typed Arrays (Int8, Int16, Int32, Uint8,Uint16,Uint32, Uint8Clamped and likewise for Float and BigInt) they can write Garbage heap friendly and more computation focused code.
Besides that, strictly speaking for standard web application development, JS ecosystem of libraries and frameworks are miles ahead for handling various kinds of UX/UI journey scenarios. Developer tools in the browser to do various kinds of performance inspection and profiling of the JS code.
I wonder why JS engines (like V8 for example) rely highly on Scalar instructions ? There is lot of scope to apply auto-vectorization and generate SSE, AVX, NEON (for ARM) instructions. If they implement this or at least provide some API like SIMD.js (one they abandoned in the past), it will make WebAssembly close to redundant unless you hate JS or other PLs which transpiles to JS.
Typescript may force you to use the awful CSS, but having some layout system is better than none. And we could also talk about event management, and sync between client and server, none of which Rust is particularly good at.
I understand 'incorrect values' (this is true, see https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/15480) .
But TypeScript definitely doesn't like adding additional fields. Right now I'm working on TypeScript, added the new Fastify raw body plugin, and forgot to extend our custom Request type. The error is:
Property 'rawBody' does not exist on type 'CustomRequest<DefaultQuery, DefaultParams, DefaultHeaders, any>'.ts(2339)
Appreciate I may be wrong, or we have different definitions here, but I'd like to discuss.
interface MyType {
a: number;
}
function process(value: MyType) {
console.log(value);
}
const value = { a: 1, b: 2 };
process(value);For systems software or libraries that are meant to be hooked into from, say, a JS/TypeScript environment (see https://deno.land, a promising alternative to Node), it seems like Rust has a lot of potential.
But for building applications (which is what I'm focused on currently) it seems Rust has a "No OOP for you!" attitude that gets in the way of modeling your application domain quickly. Yes, you can use impl and trait as an alternative to classes. But it seems like you have to jump through a lot of hoops; define your structs, define a trait for default behavior and remember that &self is provided as an implicit first argument to the methods (this is similarly cumbersome in Python), then define an impl for each corresponding struct (don't forget about &self!). As opposed to just declaring a base class and overriding when you need to in the subclasses. I am definitely not saying classes are the only way to do OOP, but at least give developers the option of using them.
I have found Swift attractive for application development because it gives you structs for one-off (value-based) data types, classes when you need an easy way to do inheritance and polymorphism (and/or need reference-based data types), and extensions as a more abstract way to enhance structs and/or classes (and/or enums). It doesn't force you to use classes (and the community appears to think protocols are a better construct), but the language remains approachable, and you can always start with classes then refactor to protocols when the need arises.
This made me curious, as it sounds like something that can be added as a transpiler option under tsconfig.json. But it turns out Typescript doesn't already have a support for "nominal" type, but there are some tricks one can leverage to achieve similar thing:
https://medium.com/better-programming/nominal-typescript-eee...
It was a brutal learning curve but having the compiler cover everything I do is a massive advantage that never stops paying dividends.
Really enjoying it so far.
TypeScript is too Java/C# for my taste. Rust feels more OCaml-ish.
It has more predictable performance than JavaScript and often it can be better.
If Rust gets a bit more ergonomic (via language or crates) it could be a good alternative and finally save us from the horrors of Electron/Slack/Bitbucket/etc.
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.
https://www.packtpub.com/eu/application-development/rust-pro...
in general, typescript is optimized for cooperating with other javascript code, to make it easy to drop it into a javascript-based project, and also, it does not really have it's own "runtime". typescript is javascript plus types. in fact, if you want to convert from typescript to javascript, you can take a typescript-file, and just delete all the type-definitions and you get a working javascript file (there are some exceptions to this, but it generally is true). this approach has it's downsides of course, for example,when you need to interface with a javascript (not typescript) module, you can easily, but you have to know what types it expects and returns,otherwise you might get invalid structures in your code. there are things that can help you there (https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped), and it works quite well in practice, but there is no 100% guarantee that the types will be correct.
>> STRICT TYPING (in typescript) For example, the data might contain additional fields or even incorrect values for declared types.
- typescript is structurally typed most of time, so if you have a function that needs an `{a:string, b:string}`, and you send it an `{a:string, b:string, c:string}`, it will accept it. it's a different trade off,sometimes better, sometimes worse, compared to nominal-typing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_type_system).
- the part "even incorrect values", it should not happen in your own code. as i wrote above, i can imagine it happening when interfacing with other non-typescript code.
>> DATA VALIDATION: You have to write data validation code to ensure that you’re operating on correct data in TypeScript. You get this for free in Rust...
in typescript if you want to read,let's say JSON data,and map it to a typescript-structure, and return an error if it does not have the correct structure, you can use libraries like IO-TS (https://github.com/gcanti/io-ts/blob/master/index.md) to make that happen. i do not know how you get this "for free" in Rust, i know there are libraries like Serde (https://serde.rs/) that do it.
I was able to archive 10x-60x speedups compared to the performance of most popular JS-only implementations.
You can make your own measurements here: https://csb-9b6mf.daninet.now.sh/
I was in particular benchmarking ECC, which is much harder to optimize in JS (and in general).
Code is here:
JS: https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcrypto/tree/master/lib/js
C: https://github.com/bcoin-org/libtorsion
To benchmark:
$ git clone https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcrypto
$ cd bcrypto
$ npm install
$ node bench/ec.js -f 'secp256k1 verify' -B js
$ git clone https://github.com/bcoin-org/libtorsion
$ cd libtorsion
$ cmake . && make
$ ./torsion_bench
$ make -f Makefile.wasi SDK=/path/to/wasi-sdk
$ ./scripts/run-wasi.sh torsion_bench.wasm ecdsaHe wants WASM to be closer to C performance. I.e. to move further along this line:
|JS|========>|WASM|=========>=========>========>|C|> Everyone says this, but I would dispute it as misleading in a lot of cases. I've been experimenting a lot with wasm lately. Yes, it is faster than javascript, but not by all that much.
I think even if it is faster in general, you might lose all that advantage as soon as you have to cross the WASM <-> JS boundary and have to create new object instances (and associated garbage) that you never would have needed to create if you had used only one language.
Therefore moving to WASM for performance reasons on a project which crosses the language boundaries very often due to browser API access doesn't seem too promising to me.
It's not a matter of speed here. It's a matter of enabling certain types of programs which are borderline impossible with pure JS runtimes.
So I will probably move most of the logic to Rust
2-3x may not be the 15-16x you see in native code, but it's still a massive speedup in already optimized code, and is likely enough to make a bunch of applications that weren't quite feasible to do in on the web now feasible.
Plus things like competitive games and what I'll call "pretty" games have to squeeze out as much performance as possible, and no hitching is acceptable to competitive games, which IMO means WASM is still a no-go for those types of games(although games that don't have this requirement undoubtedly benefit)
You can do this in JS too with TypedArray and whatnot but the key word here is 'natural.'
I've been working on a game engine as a side project with C++ and WASM -- and there are already many improvements over what I was getting with JS due to less GC, better data layout (the data layout thing is also esp. helpful for managing buffers that you drop into the GPU). I don't think it was about 'pure compute' as much as these things. C++ and Rust give you tools to manage deterministic resource utilization automatically which really helps.
A bonus is that the game runs with the same code on native desktop and mobile.
Otherwise, eventually I expect WebAssembly to match what Flash Crossfire and PNaCL were capable of 10 years ago.
Does firefox have a headless mode, a standalone implementation, or some CLI tool I can use to run a WASM binary? Running stuff in the browser is cumbersome.
Why is this the case? Can we expect it to go away as browsers mature?
One thing that's often overlooked is that even though "idiomatic Javascript" using lots of objects and properties is fairly slow, it can be made fast (within 2x of native code compiled from 'generic' C code) by using the same tricks as asm.js (basically, use numbers and typed arrays for everything). But the resulting Javascript code will be much less readable and maintainable than cross-platform C code that's compiled to WASM.
That is an insane difference even if nowhere close to native code.
Some engineering fields would be crazy with a 20% gain... 200% is huge!
They even say asm.js is supposed to be "near-native code execution speeds". In my experience, it is no where close to native speed. People should avoid this kind of deceptive marketing.
But it's way more predictable, no more crazy 95th percentiles.
> Javascript is fast enough for your use case. No one will notice the difference in a board game website.
No, actually. Have you seen how long boardgame.io's MCTS bot takes to make a Tic-Tac-Toe move? Not the end of the world, but certainly in need of improvement.
[1] https://github.com/datamllab/rlcard
[2] https://onnx.ai/
Some people want to write profitable apps in the shortest amount of time possible, while others want to advance the state of the art in technology.
IMO we always need more people in the second group. And sometimes, you can hit the jackpot and do both things at the same time!
JS is pretty fast if you use TypedArrays, are careful with WebGL calls and pool objects (reduce memory allocations).
I find it a bit strange that people talk about this as "only a problem", as though it was some weird niche edge case and not an ever-present issue. The written-in-plain-JS ecosystem completely dwarfs the written-in-TypeScript one; unless you're doing something rather trivial you're quite likely to end up depending on a library that barely had the shape of its objects in mind during development, with typings (if they're even present) that were contributed by someone that's almost definitely not the actual library author.
Of course, if you're competent enough you can correct typings and always remember to run runtime checks on data that doesn't come from you and so on. But it's too easy for a beginner to fall into traps like mishandling data that comes from a dependency (especially when it's buggy/ostensibly has typings) - in my opinion, there should be a first-party compiler/linter option to enforce checks on any `any`.
Moving to Rust doesn't eliminate validation altogether, but you don't have to do any type related validation which is nice.
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 < 1900 || 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 < 1947 || 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.`);
```
[1]: https://codesandbox.io/s/te0pn?file=/index.ts
Edit: Apparently TypeScript playground links cannot be shared :( Edit2: Published on codesandbox.io, hopefully that works
Unfortunately there's no way to know which libraries have defined their types correctly, so you end up having to check the types you get back from every library you use.
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.
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 want to use a language without sum types - you can write incredibly expressive and concise code with them.
The other major productivity boost for me is the ability to compose and chain Iterators and mix those with collection types.
This isn't a criticism of Rust; it's specifically designed for applications where those things do matter. But for the overwhelming majority of apps they don't, and I'd reach for a different tool.
I've found that once I get into a rhythm and I've been working on something in Rust for a bit, it doesn't feel that hard to deal with all that. And a few times I've thought to myself "hey maybe the GC isn't actually buying you all that much?" But then I go back to a GC'd language and watch just how much faster stuff gets done. It's not even close. I think it's one of these things where your brain doesn't notice the time that goes by when you're doing what is essentially mindless busywork.
Part of this is also having come from doing a fair bit of stuff in Haskell, Elm, and a bit of OCaml; the best "high-level" language features are inspired by that language family (including enums) and so it feels like a better control for the difference a GC makes vs. js and friends. It makes a big difference.
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.
> Working in other languages feels like going back to assembly
This is not a preference, it is an exaggeration and an attack on all other languages.
It is also quite ironic given Rust is intended for low level programming.
Rust is nowhere near the productivity of Ruby or Python. If that's the case for you maybe your projects have some peculiarities or it's a personal thing.
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.
Languages compiled to wasm have an FFI cost, and we will never fully remove it because it just uses different types than Web APIs do. This isn't a Rust problem or a C problem, it's just how wasm is.
Wasm also can't use the JS standard library, and usually ends up shipping some runtime support, like malloc or string handling, which increases download size.
Both of those limitations are why wasm won't make sense for the great majority of web dev work. But wasm shines for "engine" type code, like in this post - pure computation, without lots of links to the outside JS/DOM world.
If you’re trying to right very fast, very correct code in JavaScript/TypeScript then Rust may be more productive.
Asking out of ignorance!
With the patterns and libraries used in just this example, you can write a very high performance, memory efficient web server that can handle a large volume of concurrent requests that involve database interactions: https://github.com/actix/examples/tree/master/async_pg
All of the work has been consolidated down to a single file for illustration purposes, and it would usually be spread across files. Does it seem like a ridiculous amount of additional work, compared to other languages? I am misleading you some as there is actually a lot more to write the moment we move beyond plain vanilla workflows but this example proves what is possible.
UPD: modern JS engines are extremely capable of optimizing stuff and they can probably come up with machine code similar to what Rust or C will produce given that you keep your code predictable and optimization-friendly.
There are benchmark which compare JavaScript and AssemblyScript: https://github.com/nischayv/as-benchmarks https://github.com/nischayv/as-benchmarks/issues/3#issuecomm...
We did do a benchmark[3] and, unless we made an error (likely, given that all of us are new to WASM), found that JS was much faster for our simple algorithms. WASM had the approximate performance of our original pure Python implementation[4], so not great.
[1]: https://dnavisualization.org [2]: https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/47/W1/W20/5512090 [3]: https://github.com/Lab41/dnaviz/tree/benchmarks/benchmarks/a.... [4]: https://github.com/Lab41/squiggle
I'm not sure how to answer your question regarding whether Vapor is viable for indie hackers, because I've only been skimming the docs and looking at small examples. But it seems to draw a lot of inspiration from Express.js and/or Ruby's Sinatra library. It doesn't seem to have the up-front complexity of something like Java's Spring Framework, although I understand you can use services and dependency injection if needed. So my first impression is it's easy to get started, but it enables you to refactor to something more complex if your application demands it.
My advice is not about profit.
My "time-to-market is most important" advice (not mine, it is a very sound and well researched strategy) is about making a sustainable project:
A) most passion-only projects are abandoned at some point in order to pay for food and rent. (Yes there are few exceptions among an ocean of failed projects)
B) The other point is that even if you can run this for years before showing traction. Having users mean getting feedback, which will render some of your efforts needless.
Moreover, it was only a small part of what I said. I do think that rust doesn't make sense for other reasons, and doing a rewrite in a real project needs better reasoning otherwise you would keep rewriting forever.
Moreover2, I think you're misinterpreting the original author's intent. I'm not sure if there is interest in building AI in rust as a goal for itself. Seems to me more oriented towards the result than about the love for rust.
- it's not JavaScript anymore, you'll lose most idioms you're used to work with, and it's a nightmare to maintain because it's pretty low level.
- it won't be as fast as it could unless the runtime is aware of the fact that you are using that subset (that's why asmjs used some annotation to run on a special engine on Firefox, and part of the reason why browsers moved to wasm).
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.
(GDScript is pretty much python)
0. https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/blob/mast...
Not especially for small projects, for projects of all sizes - huge swathes of the internet still run on PHP, and it's not limited to blogs built on Wordpress.
More than a few gigantic sites (Wikipedia and PornHub come to mind) are built with PHP. This is highly anecdotal but I still see the .php extension all over the place, sometimes in sites that perform really well BTW (again, Wikipedia is a good example here).
Ruby is moving in the direction with the addition of Sorbet[1] for gradual typing. I have heard some discussion that this typing could become a formal part of Ruby 3.0.
LLVM is one of the best toolchains for many languages.
They are completely different things.
Yes, I do use a lot of small objects. That's an interesting information, I'll keep an eye on multi-value proposal, thank you!
> Most of people uses benchmark.js which also measure js <-> wasm interop overhead which usually main bottleneck.
Nope, I loaded all the data into WA module upon initialization and don't perform any additional synchronization between WA and JS afterwards (which is also kind of unfair advantage for WA).
By "ecosystem" I mean much more. PyPi currently offers around a quarter million Python packages, versus thousands for Julia. Github code and activity using Python is also currently around three orders of magnitude greater than for Julia. Python is currently the fourth most popular language on Stack Overflow (after JS, HTML, and SQL). It's a gigantic ecosystem that has evolved over three decades.
Portuguese startup based on our own version of AOLserver, based on the same principles of Apache plugins + Tcl + C, basically Rails before it was even an idea.
We got acquired, by another bigger Portuguese company (Easyphone), which alongside another acquisitions became Altitude Software.
Our stack was used to some of their products serving multiple top tier companies in Portugal, we created an IDE for our tools, written in VB.
Supported all major UNIX flavours and Windows NT/2000.
Eventually scale problems happened and we were looking how to tackle them while avoiding rewriting everything in C, as MSFT partner we got invited to try out .NET pre-public announcement, so we decided it was a good opportunity to rewrite our product in this new .NET thing.
Some of the team members eventually took all these lessons and founded OutSystems.
The amount of histories of porting code prove otherwise.
Note I am not pushing away dynamic languages, only those that don't have a JIT/AOT as part of their canonical implementation.
Common Lisp, Julia, JavaScript, PHP (7 and later) are all invited to the party.
Meanwhile maybe JRuby or PyPy will eventually get more community love, instead of being the black swans.
* error messages (I think there may be more to do, but they're better and better all the time)
* size of tasks (Still more to do, but they've shrunk a lot since it was first implemented
* async/await on no_std (initial implementation used TLS to manage some state, that's since been fixed)
Stuff still to do:
* Async functions in traits (this has a library that lets you work around this with one allocation, having this requires GATs)
* More improvements to the stuff above
* other stuff I'm sure I'm forgetting
> There is no runtime in the core/std but that's by design, there is no short term intent from the Rust team to do that.
This is true but with an asterick; https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/65875 ended up being closed with "please write an RFC," rather than "no."
Side note, I just want to say that I have mad respect for you always finding a way to stay so positive while continuing to be so heavily involved with the community, even with job changes and all of that stuff going on. You're an absolute role model for how to participate in community management and a godsend for Rust.
On the WASM side: Does WASM support real threads yet? Otherwise moving to Rust wouldn't really help you? If it's just "WebWorker" like multiple runtimes, you might still pay serialization costs to move objects between workers.
Erlang's runtime does "fine" with its preemptive concurrency model, JS runtimes are a joke in this regard.
Also, async itself doesn't magically make code run faster (on the contrary), it just lets you (ideally) do something else instead of waiting for a blocking operation to complete, or at least give you the illusion of sequential control flow (unlike nested callbacks).
I feel that Rust should be competing with C/C++ here though. I want a modern language with the same speed and control of memory usage. What’s A little frustrating (and don’t get me wrong, I’m rooting for Rust to get there) is that it feels like it should be possible to offer this, at least for threaded web servers.
> a.k.a. getting language illiterate people up to speed, and compile times.
With equally skilled people I dont think these languages yield different dev speed, apart from the damage done by compile times.
It's an unusual area where functionality (what answer you get) and performance can't be separated. This is still true on the server.
And of course, Rust and C are faster than javascript, and it will be noticeable on search algorithms, but IMO, it will not cause user loss. It is smarter to get to the stage you have those users as fast as you can to validate this need.
So I would not go into implementing new AI libs in rust as part of a turn-based game engine just for the performance gain--mainly because it is a tougher project than building a turn-based game engine!
I would search for existing, viable solutions. As I said before, this includes server AI and server trained models running on something like tensorflow.js. Additionally, I will also try to research browser libs that may use compiled webassembly and webGL. In any case, I think it's not wise to build your own for this purpose.
Rust does have these sorts of issues wrt. managing highly generic graph-like data, possibly with cycles. That's where tracing GC actually shines, and where writing that whole portion separately in something like Go might be the right answer.
When I'm writing Go, I spend the whole time yearning for the abstractions of Rust, becoming a little more bitter each time I copy and paste or have to manually reify interface{}, knowing my ceremonious verbose Go code is slower than the simpler compact Rust solution.
When I'm writing Rust, I'm loving life until I hit this sort of "intractable" [for me] problem, and I wonder if I should have used Go for this part.
(1) Is "batteries included"
(2) Has the gem/engine ecosystem where basically every problem is already solved.
(3) Expressive code like has_many :things
If we could get those things + static typing + performance everyone would switch. But that doesn't exist.
Python is very "batteries included," and there is a large set of exisitng packages for most things. One can monkey-patch things and invent cute syntax, but most python is rarely hard to reason about what's actually going on.
It's easy to bag on parts of python (eg some syntax and terrible distribution story), but I feel much less crazy (and suspicious of every punctuation mark) when working on a modern python app than when working on a modern ruby app, especially in the presence of rails.
Java is fine as a programming language. Java as a web app more or less means Spring. And Spring means XML files and annotations which come with their own problems. Kind of an out of the pan and into the fire thing.
And Pascal, Ada, Haskell, Eiffel, Standard ML, ...
None of the language you mention had any sort of wide-spread visibility at that time, meaning they were not representative of the (overwhelming) majority experience with statically typed languages.
The web was always meant to be a platform anyone could easily build on, whether they were experts or someone's little old grandma who barely knew what a keyboard was.
Not only is it gatekeeping, it's historically wrong and betrays a flawed understanding of the platform. The web has always been about ease of use and there have always been people who went out of their way to teach others how to make good use of it.
Yes, the web is broken, but the web is broken because it's no longer about everyone running a little shoebox of a server and instead now we depend on giants who see us as cattle.
And if you are used to poorly-designed UI, you will expect poorly-designed UI from yourself.
But there is a whole new generation of web developers who don't bother to learn algorithms or low level programming, and just churn out code with that hot new framework. That kind of programmers are also the ones that choose a technology because "it looks easier".
The world would be nice if management people understood not all programmers are equal, the 10x programmer is not a myth. But here on HN or reddit you see most people arguing that all programmers are similarly productive. And what we get for this is more electron apps.
You are right that quality of programmer skill and productivity has high variance, but the way people talked about the "10x programmer" was a vague vision that people pasted their ideas and personal bugaboos onto. So people got into increasingly-heated arguments and talked past each other. When we create social concepts, we need to strive for something like falsifiability -- something that lets you look at an example and say "Well actually no, thats not 'high-performing programmer' behavior -- for {{describable reason}}"
Categories matter. We should shape our categories for human happiness and human effectiveness, but categories matter.
Why?
“Today there are several languages in the ML family; the three most prominent are Standard ML (SML), OCaml and F#. Ideas from ML have influenced numerous other languages, like Haskell, Cyclone, Nemerle, ATS,[citation needed] and Elm.[3]”
If you know F#, OCAML, Haskell and scala you can see that the first two have an extremely similar syntax to ML while for the last two the syntax is very different.
OCaml is great for the application level stuff, and also performs quite well in general. But for building fundamental parts of the stack in which perf is important (like the multi-threading runtime, the garbage collector, etc.) you need to drop down to C++, C, or Rust.
OCaml is definitely much nicer to use than C and C++. But I don't find it that much nicer to use than Rust TBH.
I find OCaml quite a bit nicer to use than Rust, though in a lot of ways that's due to my preference for structuring code using modules and functors.
However, due to Cargo and the fact that Rust has good Windows support, I end up reaching for Rust much more often than I do for OCaml.
Personally I also find Elixir and the Phoenix framework very interesting.
I have also looked at Elixir and Phoenix, but have not written any code in them. I have yet to really dive into anything outside the C-like languages (Python, JS, Java, Swift, Ruby, C, C++), and Elixir seems like a good reason to venture outside my comfort zone.
By the way, no pressure, but if you ever want to discuss Swift, maybe do some paired programming/studying, let me know. I'm still fairly new but I have experimented with building a Swift-to-CSS DSL that I would like to eventually spend more time on. If you want to email me, ragheed.almidani is the name, and protonmail.com is the domain.
(alternatives like Vert.x, the less-annotation-heavy quarkus, etc).
For Java web dev I actually like Kotlin better - ktor is pretty nice.
First of all there is more to Java Web development than JEE and Spring, which in any case, other eco-systems don't have a mature answer for many of their deployment scenarios and cross system integrations.
XML is beautiful, there is yet a format that supports machine manipulation, IDE graphical tooling, comments, schema validation as XML.
Anyone that praises Rails will be right at home with XML and annotations magic.
- It's low level like C and C++ so it maps cleanly onto WASM
- In your average Rust project, all dependencies are already built from source, greatly increasing the likelihood all your dependencies can be built for WASM
- Already using LLVM as the compiler backend made WASM targeting a lot less work than for languages that need to do that work from scratch
- Probably most importantly, a lot of developers involved in core rustc development were motivated to get Rust working on WASM
At least that's my perception for how Rust became such a prominent language for WASM development early on
The solution other languages targeting wasm typically use is bundling their own garbage collector in the compiled code, which of course adds a bit of code bloat. E.g. C# blazor wasm applications are not exactly small for this reason.
There was a message yesterday in the Kotlin slack about them starting work on a wasm compiler backend for Kotlin (they already have java, native, and js compilers). https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/tree/master/compiler/ir/... Interestingly they plan to depend on the wasm GC proposal instead of bundling their own: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/
So, things are improving on this front. But it's a big reason why Rust is particularly popular for wasm right now because they have no GC and lots of developer tools that are relatively mature because they've been working on this for a while.
IMHO, this will take another few years to fully mature but inevitably lots of people are going to be writing web applications that don't involve any or very little javascript. Kotlin is starting to look very solid for any kind of cross platform Android, IOS, and web based development (as well as server development, which is what I do). Swift would be another candidate and there already is a wasm compiler for that as well.
That is only the case for open source code like crates.io, there is nothing that guarantees you will get the source code of a third-party, though.
I mention this because in the native world it is common to give customers precompiled libraries.
> - Already using LLVM as the compiler backend
Some people don't seem to know this, but all languages that target LLVM (including C, C++, Fortran, Ada, Julia, Swift and others) can be used in WebAssembly.
Having LLVM doesn't mean that webassembly Just Works, in the same way that having LLVM doesn't mean that all of its architectures Just Work. And even after getting past the "hello world" stage, there's a lot of other work to do to make it more than just a toy.
Let's take Ada, for example. https://blog.adacore.com/use-of-gnat-llvm-to-translate-ada-a... talks about how to use Ada to build stuff for wasm, but you need to include https://github.com/godunko/adawebpack/ to make things work well. Someone had to write that code.
Otherwise, I agree that not all domains are well covered by any language :-)
However, Julia also makes the experience of growing from a package user to a package developer basically seamless. A big part of what makes this seamless is that almost all julia packages are written in pure julia and thus relatively easy to read and understand for a julia programmer. This coupled with the strong introspection capabilities makes it so that users who would never be writing their own packages in Python end up contributing to the Julia ecosystem.
Coupled to this is the fact that julia is a highly composable language meaning that it's very easy to combine functionality together from two separate packages that weren't designed to work together. This composability makes julia's fewer packages have far greater leverage and applicability than Python packages and also makes it so that when you do need to make your own package, you're less likely to be reinventing the wheel every time.
Consider the fact that all the big machine learning libraries in Python all have basically implemented their own entire language with their own special compiler, all the requisite datastructures, etc. In Julia, that's rarely necessary. Flux.jl is just built using native julia datastructures and julia's own (very hackable) compiler.
On the other hand, running into Java or C# projects is hardly ever an issue; it's a lot of boiler plate (many (request/response/dto etc) models/entities and layers), but it's readable immediately and if it still runs, it means that all data is validated and I can trust it.
On the JVM its novelty will fade out while Java adopts whatever features might be relevant to the millions of Java developers out there, just like it happened with all other that came before.
And I remember the days back when Groovy was supposed to be the scripting language for JEE, and Spring was going full speed with it as Java alternative, and we even got strongly typed variant.
The impact on maintainability is about what you'd expect. Maybe, on an abstract level, the software isn't as complex as what you can do in Ruby, but the verbosity of the language brings its own maintenance challenges. I can't speak to Ruby specifically, but, in practice, I haven't found that I'm all that much more afraid to change things in a large Python codebase than a large Java one.
I'm now coming to think that the real challenge is dynamicism in general, regardless of whether it's built into the language or implemented as a library solution. So, if Java has an advantage here, it's simply that it tends to discourage people from overdoing it by making it awkward to do.
Sure, but if you don't reach market fast enough you'll have no reason to slog through anything, period. Can you imagine writing something like Facebook using Rust? It's an almost ludicrous proposition.
Static typing requires that you know what you're building at a relatively fine-grained level--how the pieces will fit together at the source code level, at least roughly. No amount of automated refactoring could ever match the flexibility of dynamic typing when you're just trying to bang out features, let alone explore the feature space, which almost by definition is what any novel solution is doing--exploring. That's why I love using embedded scripting, particularly Lua. You can gradually move components outside the dynamic environment as their place in the architecture becomes fixed and well understood.[1] So-called gradual typing doesn't really permit the same kind of flexibility because it's not the static typing, per se, that burdens development, but rather that static typing has the effect of forcing a more rigid hierarchy of higher-order abstractions and interface boundaries. What you want is the ability to slowly solidify the architecture from the outside to the inside, not the inside to the outside.
Microservices is another way to address the problem, at least in theory, but in practice doesn't actually directly resolve the real dilemmas. At best it just multiplies the number of environments in which you're faced with the problem, which can both help and hurt.
[1] Statically typed scripting languages seem rather pointless to me, and more a reflection of a fleeting fascination with REPL.
I was involved in developing large PHP and Rubby codebases and its so hard to maintain.
These days I just use SpringBoot. It strikes a good balance between providing speed to market (PHP/Ruby), maintainability and performance (the next version should support GraalVM). Cant complaint so far.
GC is figuring out things mostly correctly and the programmer can focus on other things, at least until they hit a performance problem :)
I work on a large C# platform that interops with a ton of vendor API's, the majority of which are also written in typed languages. The disjointed, loosely coupled nature of web systems is what causes problems. In particular, knowing what a "correct input" is to web systems is very difficult, where correct means:
1) Passes the API's immediate validation
2) Passes validation inside API's longer running processes
3) Passes business rules (it might be correct types, lengths etc, but fails anyway because of an incorrect combination of API calls)
Some of our vendors use Elixir, some use PHP, many use C# or Java. I really don't notice any significant difference between them on that account. The issues are all down to the complexity of the software and business requirements and that the whole thing is a giant distributed system.
I cut my teeth programming an XML web service using soap and while I can't say that it was as drop-dead simple as a restful HTTP web api these days, between the wsdl and the uddi, it sure was convenient to be able to know as a client what methods were being exposed and what inputs they expected.
Sometimes I wish the w3c had not required XML for those web services ,so that we could do that with json plus whatever add-ons can make it have an enforceable schema like XML. WSDLs were underrated.
Attaching text in form of a script anywhere in the DOM can be abused, but it is also insanely practical. I don't think Javascript is too horrible. I think the whole toolchain to get minimized and bundled JS is. That is why I am wary of TypeScript. Yes, I see its benefits, but I don't like cross-compiling if I can just not do it.
Given, I am no web developer and my "projects" on the web are tiny. I completely understand someone who likes to take the increased effort to use TypeScript, especially if your project isn't just making a text blink. If it reaches a certain size, I would probaly look into it too.
Webassembly looks interesting, but will take some time to establish itself. There are also disadvantages to that, since it could reduce the openness of the web. All the tracking we are subjected to could only be inspected by network traffic instead of looking into the source.
The problem is when dealing with other teams/products/api's it's a mess. Varying standards, varying strictness, corner cases everywhere. There are plenty of JAVA, ASP.Net APIs that are absolute nightmares to integrate with despite being strictly typed beginnings.
If you have a highly federated space, you control everything and thusly can do cool things like Rust, Lua, what have you. But, most engineers don't get such a luxury. Languages that can be rapidly morphed to accommodate all those situations achieve shipped solutions to business problems faster.
In the end, that makes money and that turns our world.
Regardless, here's the loosely related XKCD's Standards: https://xkcd.com/927/
Building some or all of those backend APIs in Rust from day 1 would not be crazy, or less productive than any other language.
I think differences in proficiency drive bigger differences in productivity than inherent language differences.
So if you were starting today to build Facebook, using a language you are already effective with would matter more than which language you use (there are plenty of people out there for whom that could be Rust, or Haskell, or Ruby, or PHP, etc).
Rust lets me make sure my code still works through refactors and code changes. With PHP I could easily break something that would only cause an error when that code actually runs. That's right, there is no sanity check at all until the parser reads that code.
That is not the timeline we're talking about here. Dynamically typed languages started taking off at the turn of the millenium and really exploded in the second half of the aughts. Java didn't even exist in the early 90s.
* Better handling of "null"-ness
* Sum types
* Stricter/different error-handling
* Move semantics, which can actually be nice for some APIs outside of any performance considerations
Kotlin checks a couple of these boxes, but then is also GC'd, so also gets rid of a lot of "noise" that would be in the equivalent Rust code.
For typical backend junk, I'd be Kotlin first, but I'd definitely consider Rust if performance (non-IO) was a concern.
Rust gives you the features to auto-manage these "silly little details", you simply have to opt-in to them with a bit of boilerplate. Stuff like Rc<RefCell<T>> and the like is there for a reason.
Also "stuff like" is kind of the problem; all of the smart pointer types have differences that matter, and none of them is general enough to cover all use cases. Arc<Mutex<Box<T>>> comes the closest to a "general" solution, but the boilerplate is rather a lot just for the sake of not having to think about this stuff, and you still can't use it if T isn't Send.
You're really picking a fight with the language if you insist on avoiding making these decisions, and in the end it will just slow you down even more than going with the grain. And to add insult to injury, if you write all your code like that it'll likely be slower than OCaml or Haskell anyway. Rust can't keep up with a good GC on allocation throughput; the performance advantages come from managing things yourself (and avoiding heavy allocation in the first place).
Rc and friends are useful, but they don't make the problem go away.
As I said, it's not that it's even really all that hard. But it is time consuming.
There would also be a compiler attribute #![no_gc] that make it so that you have to provide your own implementation of the GC runtime to use GC types. (similar to how executors work for futures)
Describing those fixed well defined contracts on top of the architurally absurd stack that is TCP/DNS/TLS/HTTP/Ajax/Dom/JS engine/Server side graphql/rpc/rest / database... doesnt by you anything but slower iteration speed and an unwieldy schema.
These components don’t have the same impedance, the same flavour to their design. Necessarily their schema would be a mess.
Also, what stops something like
function add(int a, int b) -> int {
return a-b;
}
What would be nice is typing like typescript - optional typing. Where i can provide a typings binding separate from the code (in the way that i can bring my own tests without changing anything of production code if you’ve made an unholy mess of testing). Same argument for optional typing outside the main source code - odds on you’re going to misunderstand or misuse types, I’d like to use them where they make sense and ignore your steaming pile of types. Impossible in a language like haskell where types are inline rather than annotations attached to code.
cmon... "it doesn't guard you against every logic error under the sun" isn't a great argument
Under the same pressures it's pretty likely that the same teams that deploy dynamic language code to production and get an unexpected nil deploy statically typed code to production which unwraps an unexpected None and throws exceptions or panics.
>Also, what stops something like
having a more precise specification. E.g. adding a commutativity requirement would eliminate your example.
A contract system like clojure's spec sounds close to what you're describing.
However... software development has become a mess of slow technologies and abstractions one on top of the other.
Some people are working routinely in a text editor that is behind three operating systems: the VM/hypervisor, the usual operating system (Windows/macOS/Linux) and then a browser instance (which is like a operating system now). Then add all the drivers, libraries, frameworks etc. that go in-between.
While I don't like that WebAssembly is yet another abstraction, at least it is a chance for a resurgence of system programming languages and to proper software engineering...
I have been playing with Rust, but not sure about how good an idea it is for the front end yet though.
The problem here is the concept of SPA itself - it's a complete hack which is plastered over with various tricks to make it halfway usable. This has been going on for years now.
Websites on the other hand are slow because of the tracking and the ads which load tons of JS. Remove that and the web will be blazing fast.
With sufficient ad blocking and JS white listing, I can attest to this.
After removing ads and analytics, sites that rely on JavaScript to render significant amounts of content are the slowest.
Many of the things you say are true - Rust libraries in general need some love and polish before they can be beginner-friendly, but some are getting there. The difference between Diesel and Rocket, for example, is quite stark. The former has only the barest minimum 'examples' and 'guide', if they may be called that, and I feel like I'm expected to read and understand its source code to become really proficient with it. It takes a lot of experimenting and trial+error to do anything beyond the basics. Rocket, on the other hand, has a very comprehensive guide with useful examples and, so far, has been enjoyable to work.
That said, there are still a lot of "convenience" features missing. My current notable example is forms. As I'm doing it (I haven't looked into any addons to Rocket for this), I have to write out the HTML for the form myself, along with any Javascript I might require for validation, etc, then write the server-side methods for GET/POST, making sure to maintain the state myself. In this regard, something like Django's effortless ease to get a form on screen and store its data into a database really showcases where Rust (Rocket) still has a long way to go.
Hopefully, with more people using it, the tools and libraries will improve and mature, particularly the documentation.
When all is said and done, I enjoy "slogging" through Rust a lot more than I did working with Django, even with the slower progress. Something about this language really speaks to me.
[1] https://gist.github.com/dcolthorp/aa21cf87d847ae9942106435bf...
[2] https://dev.to/gcanti/functional-design-smart-constructors-1...
If you just want to run some computational code (which is the case for most of the Wasm use today), it will Just Work, as you say.
In fact, that is how I sped up a webpage: I just wrote myself the minimal support needed to run the code that computed X, and that's it. I don't want the entire world or standard library for computational bits to work.
This is just true of any architecture. LLVM is a toolkit, it isn't magic.
There's no evidence proving the opposite either. We can't say anything beyond that the existing studies don't really show anything. I think it's pretty obvious that the limit of static typing reduces logic bugs (since it can actually be used to prove statements about the logic), but beyond that everything is kind of up in the air.
>Under the same pressures it's pretty likely that the same teams that deploy dynamic language code to production and get an unexpected nil deploy statically typed code to production which unwraps an unexpected None and throws exceptions or panics.
There's nothing to support that that this is 'pretty likely'. As far as we know, it could very well be that statically typed languages push you in the direction of handling it the right way. Or hell, it could be that a team using a dynamic language is more cautious and conscious of edge cases.
C++ these days is a far more pleasant beast than the VS6 days, the tooling is pretty good and the language can be tamed into a pretty elegant beast with the right coding standards and discipline.
It only takes a handful of extremely passionate engineers (and I really mean a handful, like less that 2% of engineers in an org) to raise the quality-floor of the entire codebase.
It's been used at every workplace I've been at, sometimes well, sometimes not so well, just like any language. No idea what the point of blanket statements like this is.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php claims ~79% of websites whose backend is known use PHP.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-ruby shows Ruby has grown from 2.5-3.5% over the last year.
Should have said methods but you get what I mean. And I've encountered ambiguous and pointless abbreviations all over the place.
But now that I'm older, I appreciate things being more descriptive and orderly, including strict use of semicolons, functions that say what they are doing (e.g. to_string), or being explicit about converting (e.g. static_cast<type>)
I think it's because I find trying to make everything as succinct as possible ends up trying to be too clever.
https://www.mediaan.com/mediaan-blog/kotlin-vs-java Things like state of the art type inference, data classes and lambda syntax, no semi colon and ton of other things allow for reduced syntactic noise.
But I'd argue that, if you need to lean on compiler plugins to do it, it's sort of a rhetorical Pyrrhic victory.
As long as the platform exists, its main language is the one holding the keys.
Interestingly, I see the same trends with Rust -- high ratio of packages to users (already ~43K crates, despite having only 3% share of Stack Overflow last year), easy packaging (`cargo publish`), and high composability (e.g., via traits, type parameters, etc.).
An obvious question is, why does Rust have 10x more packages than Julia already, and almost a fifth as many as Python? I think it's because from day one Rust has appealed to a broader group of developers (anyone seeking better performance and/or concurrency, with memory safety and modern language features like algebraic data types, will consider Rust). Julia, in contrast, has always targeted the scientific computing community, which contains a much smaller group of developers who seem mostly content with existing tools.
Julia has a harder marketing job than Rust. Julia needs to convince people who use $slow_dynamic_language and $fast_static_language together that they'd be better served by just using Julia for both jobs.
Even more importantly though, julia needs to convince people that it's premise is even possible. People have deep seated biases that make them unaware that it's even possible for a dynamic, garbage collected language to be fast.
Rust on the other hand 'just' has to convince people that it's a better ~1:1 replacement for C++. Most people who have written C++ deeply believe that a better language is possible and yearn for that language.
Python, R and Matlab users typically don't believe that it's possible for a language to do what julia does.
Furthermore, Julia did initially spend a lot of marketing effort on the scientific community, which is somewhat small, and is more composed of people who just see their language as a tool that only needs to be 'good enough', so they're less likely to want to switch than say systems programmers who spend all day faced with C++'s inadequacies.
Rust invested in a package manager very early, and specifically designed things to make it easy to publish packages.
Rust has a smaller standard library, and so you often need packages to do things that you may not need in other languages, which encourages the use of packages, which I think encourages the publishing of them as well, not to mention that there are gaps that would get filled by packages.
As a hobby thing I'm taking an almost 30 year code base written in C and reworking it into C++17. I've become somehow somewhat adept at this transformation over the years :-)
Long-term memory is similar, while it's not bounded in the same way it takes time and effort to develop. I'd rather type `git new-branch` than have to remember `git checkout -b` and I certainly don't alias it to `git nb` or something: I can type `git n<TAB>` and let that complete it.
I find myself more annoyed by dynamic languages, because the tooling just isn't at the same level. All sorts of 'hints' that I rely on in java simply aren't there in other languages, and the ide throws up it's hands and is like '...? I guess this is right? Godspeed sir', and I wind up having to go lookup documentation rather than ctrl clicking into underlying functions and code. It's really annoying, and it's made me be more appreciative of staticly typed languages.
Speaking from personal experience, I would add that some people use Python, not only because that's what they already know, but also because... everyone else in their field is using Python and its ecosystem. New advances in their field occur largely within the confines of that ecosystem. It's hard to leave the pack behind.
Large ecosystems have significant network effects that act as barriers to new entrants.
It only takes a handful of extremely passionate engineers > It only takes a handful of paid engineers, full time assigned to the task
What I mean to say is that with a monorepo, you leave the door open to essentially passion-driven contributions made by the other half of that 2%. In non-monorepo environments, the barrier to uniform adoption is too high for someone that isn't full-time assigned to the task to justify.
Some people are genuinely passionate about this stuff, and want to take on the task of migrating the entire code base, because it's a fun challenge and it'll improve their day-to-day work every day for the remainder of their employment. They're very rare, but they do exist, and with a monorepo those people are better-equipped to drag the company forward.
I have some news - passion is not enough, and there are more than 2% of people working on things they are passionate about - it only 2% get lucky.
I can think of a few instances in my recent career at large monorepo company where I have built something on the scale of "passionate, could improve our working lives"
One died because ... well I gave up, two are used locally by my team and those I could persuade, whilst other solutions built by others for the same fix have gone on to be blessed officially, (ie replaced by grassroots competition) and one was replaced by a fully mandated and funded project that spotted the need and just steamrollered over all the local fixes.
One is still outstanding and I think well worth pushing still.
But I don't dream of the big win where suddenly the Board says "why, without your glasses Miss Moneypenny you look ravishing".
I get paid, I work, and I try and make the world a bit better where I can. I am passionate about it. But i don't write blog posts about how passionate I am.
Maybe I should :-)