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Comment by jtokoph | Hacker News Reader

I think Language Servers are my favorite feature from Microsoft in the development of VSCode. Microsoft has come a long way with open source, not only with VSCode but improving developer tools across the board.

Similar to textmate grammars being adopted by virtually every new editor, language servers will help others bootstrap new editor concepts more rapidly and with a more rich feature set from the start.

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I think Microsoft rarely gets credit for plenty. They were the ones who started AJAX and Mozilla reverse engineered it for example. Now they are going pretty much all in for WebAssembly with C# with their Blazor project which lets you either render views on the server as they already are or render them on the client with a 1 liner type of setting. I have yet to see another major company building WebAssembly tooling this early on. This is the kind of thing that puts WebAssembly in the mainstream and readily available though.

> They were the ones who started AJAX and Mozilla reverse engineered it for example.

I think you have your answer right there. MS added AJAX as a proprietary feature to make the experience of using Outlook in Explorer richer than in Mozilla.

At the time they were ignoring standards bodies and trying to lock thr web down to running in IE on Windows only. Hence them paying Apple to push a similar (but inferior) version of IE on the Mac.

" MS added AJAX as a proprietary feature to make the experience of using Outlook in Explorer richer than in Mozilla."

No, they wanted Outllok Web to be closer in usability to Outlook Desktop. They had a problem and they solved it. This is how the web standards body works anyway : somebody does something good/inovative (see ajax, jquery etc etc) and after a while it gets standardized.

There was no standard to ignore since the whole feature set didn't exist. Firefox is not ignoring a standard by integrating Pocket to the address bar.

> I have yet to see another major company building WebAssembly tooling this early on.

Qt has been working on webassembly support for more than 1 year - https://msorvig.github.io/qt-webassembly-examples/quick_cloc...

Emphasis on major.

> They were the ones who started AJAX and Mozilla reverse engineered it for example.

Yes, Microsoft even invented DHTML(which wasn't in the DOM spec). But Microsoft also stalled web standards and Ecmascript effort for a whole decade as well.

Rust+WebAssembly is excellent.

I'm sure I'm missing something. The beauty of Rust is you can operate at the baremetal level in safety. It's not the most productive language to work with. So why target WebAssembly from it?

Some of us find the language highly productive, and extremely accurate in its usage in many different spaces.

In terms of webassembly, there is a sweet spot for Rust, which is in speeding up CPU bound JS routines. There is a project, wasm-bindgen, to make building these high performance pieces and injecting them into JS easy.

Some of us even want to see it grow as an alternative language for full web development. There are a few projects that aim to make this easy (compiling to wasm): stdweb, cargo-web, js-sys. It’s already a fully capable language capable of targeting the web.

The features you get for this that many of us appreciate: no garbage collector (ie bounded memory usage), strict error checking, strongly typed null checks, an amazing type system, etc. Productivity means different things to different people.

Here's an example: I wanted to have decent hashing performance in JavaScript (large file uploads protected against bitrot). There are a hodgepodge of different JavaScript libraries with inconsistent algorithm support and performance characteristics; SubtleCrypto is becoming more standard but has limited algorithm support and doesn't support efficient operations on large inputs.

With https://github.com/acdha/wasm-hashing I was able to use the high-quality Rust hashing system to support all of the different algorithms I needed with a consistent interface and performance was actually competitive with or better than the browsers' native SubtleCrypto implementation.

That's a really nice capability to have in your back pocket, especially since it comes with Rust's usual assistance for code-quality.

That’s very cool!

Is there a reason you’re using wasm-bindgen directly instead of using wasm-pack?

When I started wasm-pack was still moving pretty rapidly and it took a lot longer to do builds when I was working interactively. Now that the split went through I've been meaning to revisit that.

Ah, cool :) if it goes poorly, I’m sure the team would love to know!

They've posted a lot of interesting updates since I last worked on that. Might be time to dust that project off.

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