Rust Language Server VS vanilla-teuxdeux

In the last there was RLS that did exactly that. But the approach of rust-analyzer was found to be more performant.

LSP support seems to be lacking as well, at least rust doesn't seem to have Cargo.toml support? https://github.com/rust-lang/rls/issues/785

apparently, it means that you're using the old RLS-based Rust plugin for VS Code, rather than the rust-analyzer plugin. You probably won't see a lot of people familiar with RLS's error messages.

Why: The rust-analyzer extension integrates with rust-analyzer, an alternative language server for Rust. rust-analyzer tends to perform better and get less confused with your code as compared to RLS, which the Rust extension uses.

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)

Python the core devs don't care about tooling and they have IDE's, Java is an enterprise monolith so IDE's are the standard, Rust yes it is (https://github.com/rust-lang/rls), Elm I have no idea I don't use it.

A few years back I stumbled into something a bit more complex, still done in pure js, just for the hell of it: https://github.com/morris/vanilla-todo

And then wrote my own version, with code a lot closer to modern react, with undo/redo and other niceties - https://github.com/ivank/vanilla-teuxdeux

And what I leaned is that is astonishingly easy to write code that would be understandable to people coming from the redux crowd. Maybe that’s because redux is just such a simple concept in and off itself - a glorified switch on a big object. And it’s also quite easy to hack a simple version of vdom to make it all work.

What’s missing from all those vanilla js efforts though turned out to be testability. There is a ton of code in the modern js world just to allow you to mock/test your components, and thats for me the real tragedy of vanilla js.

I have no idea why W3C crowd have not invested into standardizing js tests in all these years…

Kinda like restarting windows to fix it, rather than figuring out whats wrong.

And you could get quite far that way. 37signal’s basecamp was like that - an html app with vanilla js sprinkled throughout. Worked great.

But there is a limit in complexity. JS and html are great for building websites, but if you want to build an actual application, you need to be really clever and accept a lot of limitations. React just lifts the ceiling of what you can do, without being all to complicated.

And you can use the technics of react without react itself too, once you understand what it is all about - https://github.com/ivank/vanilla-teuxdeux

Recently I went on a deep dive to test for myself if it’s even possible to write a modern looking web application with no build tools or dependencies, and turns out its very doable - https://github.com/ivank/vanilla-teuxdeux

Web tech has gone a long way and gives us a ton of stuff for free, without the need to reimplement it all in JS. Though the apis themselves are often rather awkward.

Sadly, the biggest missing piece in all of it though is testing.

Hah last year I did my case study of building an app with only web tech - no dependencies, build steps etc. - https://github.com/ivank/vanilla-teuxdeux

Figured out virtual dom is the one big missing piece to make webdev workable without any dependencies at all.

I can see other people are getting to similar conclusions:)