Why is Rust being used to replace parts of the JavaScript web ecosystem like minification (Terser), transpilation (Babel), formatting (Prettier), bundling (webpack), linting (ESLint), and more?
I had the impression Rust doesn’t handle concurrency particularly well, at least no better than Python, which does it badly (i.e. with colored functions). Golang, Erlang/Elixir, and GHC (Haskell) are way better in that regard, though they each have their own unrelated issues. I had believed for a while that Purescript targeting the Erlang VM and with all the JS tooling extirpated might be the answer, but that was just a pipe dream and I don’t know if it was really workable.
Rust makes multi threading very easy you can just use
thread::spawn();
But rust makes Async difficult because it’s naturally stackless so you need to create your own scheduler or use someone else’s like Tokio. Also, people have a bad habit of conflating async with concurrency which makes it more confusing.
Sure you can spawn threads but now you have all the hazards of shared memory and locks, giving the 2.0 version of aliasing errors and use-after-free bugs. Also, those are POSIX threads, which are quite heavyweight compared to the in-process multitasking of Golang etc. So I would say that’s not really an answer.
What exactly are the hazards of shared memory and locks? The ownership system and the borrow checker do a pretty good job at enforcing correct usage, and if you are clever you can even guarantee no deadlocks (talk at rustconf 2024 about the fuchsia network stack).
True, but of course it’s always a trade-off. At a certain point I have to defer to your judgment, at least until I’ve written some Rust code. But I’ve written a fair amount of C++ and a little bit of Ada and don’t find them all that convenient compared to Python or Haskell or whatever. We’ll see. ;)
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I had the impression Rust doesn’t handle concurrency particularly well, at least no better than Python, which does it badly (i.e. with colored functions). Golang, Erlang/Elixir, and GHC (Haskell) are way better in that regard, though they each have their own unrelated issues. I had believed for a while that Purescript targeting the Erlang VM and with all the JS tooling extirpated might be the answer, but that was just a pipe dream and I don’t know if it was really workable.
Rust makes multi threading very easy you can just use
thread::spawn();But rust makes Async difficult because it’s naturally stackless so you need to create your own scheduler or use someone else’s like Tokio. Also, people have a bad habit of conflating async with concurrency which makes it more confusing.
Sure you can spawn threads but now you have all the hazards of shared memory and locks, giving the 2.0 version of aliasing errors and use-after-free bugs. Also, those are POSIX threads, which are quite heavyweight compared to the in-process multitasking of Golang etc. So I would say that’s not really an answer.
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What exactly are the hazards of shared memory and locks? The ownership system and the borrow checker do a pretty good job at enforcing correct usage, and if you are clever you can even guarantee no deadlocks (talk at rustconf 2024 about the fuchsia network stack).
Have you tried Gleam?
No I haven’t, I’ll take a look at it, though I felt suspicious of “task.async” as shown on the front page of gleam.run.
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True, but of course it’s always a trade-off. At a certain point I have to defer to your judgment, at least until I’ve written some Rust code. But I’ve written a fair amount of C++ and a little bit of Ada and don’t find them all that convenient compared to Python or Haskell or whatever. We’ll see. ;)
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