this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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The JS tooling universe has always seemed like a Lovecraftian hellscape to me. I've managed to stay away from it so far, but if I were caught in it, of course I'd be trying to escape any way I could. It sounds like Rust's attraction here has been as a viable escape corridor rather than anything about Rust per se.
In particular, I get that everyone wants their code to be faster, and I get that certain bloaty apps (browsers) need to get their memory footprint under control, and a few niche areas (OS kernels, realtime control) can't stand GC pauses. Other than that though, what is the attraction of Rust for stuff like tooling? As opposed to a (maybe hypothetical) compiled, GC'd language with a good type system and not too much abstraction inversion (Haskell's weakness, more or less).
Has Golang fizzled? It has struck me as too primitive, but basically on the right track.
Rust seems neat from a language geek perspective, but from what I can tell, it requires considerable effort from the programmer handle a problem (manual storage reclamation) that most programs don't really have. I do want to try it sometime. So the Rust question is intended as more inquisitive/head scratching rather than argumentative.
I think there's room for a rust-lite language that is GCed. Something with a functional-style type system and that compiles to machine code.
Roc is a candidate for this language. Basically Elm that compiles to machine code, but with a number of tweaks to make it work for more than just a web front end. Like Elm, the type system is haskell like, but simplified.
Sounds kinda like Go. It's not functional, but functional patterns work well there.
It's not great for FE though.
What's FE?
Front end