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Comment by pkolaczk | Hacker News Reader

While Rust is a very cool technology, I don't think it is the best tool for web development. Manual memory management and constant thinking about ownership and memory sharing is additional productivity overhead, and you don't gain anything from it because the final code is running in a GCed runtime anyways.

I'd use TypeScript or Scala.js.

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I've found Rust is great for doing heavy lifting (parsing/compiling/graph analysis, etc) on the frontend, as long as you can define the boundary between wasm/JS reasonably cleanly. And in that code I don't think there's a productivity hit as you can benefit a lot from the stricter types (ADT pattern matching, etc) and more reliable performance.

For more straightforward UI code, I'd agree that TypeScript strikes a much better balance right now, especially for (almost) seamlessly working with the wider ecosystem. I moved away from Scala.js because defining the boundary transition was quite error prone, but maybe I was missing something.

WebAssembly code has to do its own memory management anyway. You don't get the benefits of the JavaScript GC.

I didn't say you got benefits of JS GC nor lack of JS GC. And that's the point: you don't get benefits, but you pay the price in lower productivity. Rust is a pleasant language to write in, but it is nowhere as expressive and fast to develop in as TypeScript, Scala or even Kotlin.

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