crank VS rust-dominator

If you enjoy this approach, you might enjoy the Crank JS framework. https://crank.js.org/

> Crank uses generator functions to define stateful components. You store state in local variables, and `yield` rather than `return` to keep it around.

I'm very interested in seeing if using the commonly implemented forms of compiler support for async programming can also be well used for GUI programming. One wishawa[0] is also perusing this approach in Rust but I first came upon this idea from the crank-js[1] authors. It wasn't clear to me why that one never went anywhere. Was it failure with the approach or was React just a good solution in the space? I can say this though, there's something strikingly elegant about those initial samples of using JavaScript generators for components.

[0]: https://github.com/wishawa/async_ui

[1]: https://github.com/bikeshaving/crank

Take a look at crank.js, a JavaScript framework where components can be written as async functions or as generators. It seems similar to what you're trying to do :)

Well there's https://crank.js.org that uses native js generators where you would you normally put hooks in. Never used it but looked like a very neat idea.

Reminds me of https://github.com/bikeshaving/crank, which was rather fun for a PoC I made a while back.

Strictly speaking, the framework hides this complexity away, but it still exists and it is the framework that's now paying the extra cost. Of course a framework is allowed, and should, when possible, hide away these things. For example Crank.js uses generators to allow for async Components as first class citizens, https://github.com/bikeshaving/crank, but they're still having to deal with the pitfalls of asynchronous work.

To give the author of https://crank.js.org/ due credit, after reading through the descriptive posts I was impressed by the amount of thought and design that went into it.

> What do you propose as an alternative?

There are lots of alternatives, but perhaps the simplest would have been to use async generators. This is how Crank[0] (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) works, and it allows you to do anything (AFAIK) that's possible with hooks with a much simpler and more testable API.

> So, sure, there are limitations and rules you have to pay attention to with hooks... but that's just programming.

No, it's not. The biggest problem with React hooks is that they are not composed of transferable knowledge, meaning memorizing these rules and patterns does not transfer outside of React; likewise, I can't use much of the knowledge I have already built up over many years of my career when using hooks. It's the same argument that's made against Rails, where you have to learn tons of Rails-specific idioms (on top of having to understand general concepts like relational database access patterns) instead of just writing code in a way that's more direct and intuitive for anyone.

My brain has limited RAM. The more things I have to keep in my head when developing against an API, the more likely I am to make a mistake. With every release of React, I seem to have to keep more and more of these details in my brain as I work. Contrast this with something like Svelte, where you really only need to fully grok about two concepts to use it effectively. I understand that this is the tradeoff the React team made, but I'm not convinced it's worth it.

[0]: https://crank.js.org/ and https://crank.js.org/blog/introducing-crank

They are both async and made for GUI -- in case of rust-signals WebGUI, provided by dominator and MoonZoon.

You shouldn’t ever need to deal with OsString itself on wasm32-unknown-unknown, since that target basically just doesn’t cover functionality that needs it, but the actual situation is genuinely worse than OsString: Rust insists on valid Unicode (as is right and proper), but the web suffers from the affliction of ill-formed UTF-16. If you blindly convert from JavaScript strings to Rust strings, you will encounter data and functionality loss in a few situations, in practice always involving IME (or similar) text entry on Windows. The first bug I filed about this: https://github.com/Pauan/rust-dominator/issues/10, and you can follow further links if you’re interested. IE and Edge used to be largely immune to this, but IE is dead and I suppose Edge will have regressed in this way with the Chromium migration, since the bug filed in Chromium a few years ago <https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=949056> has languished. (Firefox too, with <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541349>.) In the worst-case scenario, careless use like was the case in rust-dominator will mean that some users typing with particular software in a language that’s outside the Basic Multilingual Plane will not be able to type anything.

One comparison I'm missing , which I think provides quite a nice solution in Rust, is the signals based approach popularized by Solid JS and implemented in Rust by sycamore and earlier by dominator.

Missing support for characters beyond U+FFFF is the main problem caused by surrogates (their existence, even if indirect)—it normally comes of some kind of UCS-2/UTF-16 confusion. It’s not fair to disqualify them. The only (class of) case that I’m aware of for a long time where it’s not linked to that is with MySQL’s idiotic utf8 → utf8mb3 type.

You may not have encountered such bugs, but I’m very familiar with surrogate-related bugs, because I use a Compose key extensively. I haven’t been using Windows for the last year, but from time to time I would definitely encounter bugs that are certainly due to surrogates. On the web, I found bugs a few times, all but once in Rust WebAssembly things, such as https://github.com/Pauan/rust-dominator/issues/10. And even now I’m back on Linux, I know of one almost certainly surrogate-related bug: I can’t type astral plane characters in Zoom at all; pretty sure I had this problem back on Windows, too. Copy and paste, sure, but type, no, they become REPLACEMENT CHARACTER.

The history is unfortunate but I strongly refute that they had not much choice. UCS-2 should have been abandoned as a failed experiment. Certainly there had been significant investment into it in the last few years, but with the benefit of hindsight, switching to UTF-8 (which was invented before they decided on surrogates) would have made everyone’s life much easier, especially given its ASCII-compatibility.

Ah, BOM characters. Haven’t seen one in years. Good riddance.

I really don't understand why everyone jumps to Yew when it comes to front-end development. Dominator is a far cleaner and more Rust-orientated approach to building front-end apps. I have worked with both and I feel that Yew adds a lot complexity/forces a lot of design philosophies but gives very little back in terms of advantages.

Hi, I've just released a major new version of Silkenweb. It's a signals based web framework like Dominator or Sycamore, but with the emphasis on plain rust syntax rather than a macro DSL.

Check out the alternatives without vdom, especially Dominator https://github.com/Pauan/rust-dominator. It’s faster than nearly all JS frameworks. The underlying rust-signals it’s based on is a fantastic crate. Unfortunately it’s not very well documented (check the prs for some wip docs). I got a frontend up and going with reactivity and nice styles using trunk and tailwindcss with daisyUI very quickly.

- https://github.com/Pauan/rust-dominator

How does this compare to dominator?