this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Programming Languages

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Hello!

This is the current Lemmy equivalent of https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/.

The content and rules are the same here as they are over there. Taken directly from the /r/ProgrammingLanguages overview:

This community is dedicated to the theory, design and implementation of programming languages.

Be nice to each other. Flame wars and rants are not welcomed. Please also put some effort into your post.

This isn't the right place to ask questions such as "What language should I use for X", "what language should I learn", and "what's your favorite language". Such questions should be posted in /c/learn_programming or /c/programming.

This is the right place for posts like the following:

See /r/ProgrammingLanguages for specific examples

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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/1379446

Why I think Typescript is A Good Thing, But mainly a complaint about the number of programming languages. Other than objects (which were not invented), I don't think any of them are a marked improvement on PL/1.

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[–] Knusper@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

JavaScript’s longevity is assured for one reason. Browsers only support JavaScript.

I do agree that JavaScript will be with us for quite a while still, but that statement has a caveat: WebAssembly

You can use a backend language, for example Rust has good tooling here, and compile it to WebAssembly, which runs in browsers.
That way, your frontend stack can be HTML+CSS+Rust.

This also has various advantages:

  • Better performance than JS.
  • Can share the communication model between backend and frontend.
  • Don't have to write JS (or TS, which still carries over quite a few oddities from JS).
[–] sirdorius@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No, you can't replace JS with Wasm entirely. Wasm can't access the DOM https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Concepts

[–] v9CYKjLeia10dZpz88iU@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It’s not a perfect solution yet, but their comment is mostly accurate. wasm-bindgen works well enough to create whatever else is missing. In my opinion, it can feel annoying to use when doing stuff like managing callbacks with rust, but, there are web frontend frameworks that are progressing.

I’ve used Dioxus. If the application isn’t too complicated, it’s not a bad experience. It’s still in development though. There’s also Yew, which has a similar react like design that Dioxus uses, but I preferred Dioxus. Lemmy also actually has a frontend client that uses Leptos, which is another react like framework in rust.

If someone was using egui, I don’t think they would have issues with their user interface on the web. (but be more constrained to the limitations of it)

—-

They were also only correcting the author who stated browsers support only JS. I mean, I’m not sure I would recommend rust to a new developer, but, I think they’re correct that browsers support more than JS. (Browsers are just not supporting WebAssembly to the level of JS yet)

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

I'm using Leptos myself and my understanding is that it's decisively different from React in that it does not maintain a Virtual DOM. In that sense, it's more reactive than React.

Well, unless you meant something different. I don't know terribly much about React. 🙃

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

As I understand things, yes, WASM has to interop with JS to handle the DOM access. But I have implemented a small UI with DOM access and had to write no JS myself, because frameworks can generate that interop code for you.

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