Hacker News Reader

Comment by faraaz98 | Hacker News Reader

Can we start getting frameworks in other languages that compile to WebAssembly instead. We already have enough JS frameworks

View on HN

Rust compiles to WebAssembly and has a few web frameworks already. Many other languages also have web frameworks and compile to JS. Today it is possible to do web development and avoid JS entirely.

Codebases compiled to WebAssembly still cannot access the DOM directly. So yes, for now you still need JavaScript.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Concept...

Yes, but languages/frameworks can provide their own abstractions to access the DOM and web platform so that you can avoid writing any JavaScript yourself, for example `web_sys` in Rust.

I have tried writing websites with rust instead of JavaScript. Unfortunately, the tooling is just not there. More specifically, I am talking about wasm-bindgen, which provides two-way bindings. The problem with it is that since all the declarations are generated with build.rs, there is no autocompletion. Since I am spoiled by modern tooling, no autocompletion to me means not feasible pass demo stage. (https://github.com/rust-lang/rls/issues/1489)

Aside from the lack of autocompletion, passing rust closures to js land (DOM) is extremely janky as well. However, that might be caused by my lack of experience with rust.

(If you are curious, this is what I made: https://github.com/SCLeoX/non-grid-path-finder)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com