My main issue is having to buy my parents a bigger TV every few years because the fonts keep getting smaller and their eyes keep getting worse.
WebAssembly and Rust may be massive overkill for most web applications, but so is React or Vue or whatever Javascript framework is popular these days. When the inevitable rewrite happens, we might as well enjoy the benefits of the new, faster-than-the-old-evolved-moloch web UI.
If anything the move from the old system (React+WebAssembly) to the new one (Rust+minimal JS+WebAssembly) will make the web application itself smaller and easier to grasp.
A valid reason to switch to Rust should be a better developer experience, but it will require lots of upfront effort to realize the benefits. I doubt that it's worth it for small to medium-sized web applications.
Also, React itself is very much lightweight and fast, it's the developers who use it to program slow websites.
They mentioned Leptos as an inspiration but this is clearly very different and has a lot of interesting features.
The concept behind the way these platform renders is very similar, so the new Amazon UI may be terrible as well, but I wouldn't expect whoever made the GUI framework they use now to make the same mistakes Flutter made.
Edit: after looking into this some more, it looks like the approach Amazon took is quite different from most Rust UI libraries. They have written their own framework that basically re-implements React but entirely on the WebAssembly side. I don't think it works by throwing a <canvas> onto the screen and implementing a browser rendering engine in JS+WASM like Flutter does. They also seem to target native code where they do all the rendering themselves, but probably faster because they control all the layers and don't need to build a general-purpose UI engine for their video player with extra steps.
It's fast, ergonomic, and the code has fewer defects than code written in other languages. (Google did a study on this.)
It's not as unapproachable as the memes make it seem. It's no harder or less productive than Java or Golang to write. (Google also did a study on this.)
The Rust WASM deploy story is sublime and is going to help it take over the world.
You can mix and match a C# Blazor component and a Rust component, and a Python component and they all compile to WASM and runs at equal speed.
wondering if that’s the UI in question
Not just my predecessor was confused by the wording and categories put on the page.
