AstonJ

AstonJ

Swift vs Rust for WASM/WebAssembly

Wondering if anyone has any thoughts on choosing between these two languages for WebAssembly?

I definitely want to explore wasm, and really love the idea of learning both of these, however, I can only squeeze one in right now.

Anyone have any thoughts? Which might be the easier route? Which will be more useful/fully featured/supported? etc.

Here are some pros and cons (from a personal perspective so far):

Rust

  • Can also be used with Elixir/Erlang nifs
  • Can also be used in other areas such as general web dev
  • Huge community support

Swift

  • Can be used for iOS/macOS apps
  • While can be used for other areas (such as web dev too - I get the feeling not quite as well as Rust)
  • Huge Apple support

Most Liked

SmithyTT

SmithyTT

Rust.

Swift for WebAssembly is not quite there yet…

herbert

herbert

Author of Hands-on Rust

I don’t have a lot of experience with Swift, so I can’t really comment on it. Rust works very well with web assembly (some assembly required, heh). One of the reasons I picked up Rust was that it made it easy to write tutorials and include a web-runnable version (my Roguelike Tutorial series has each example as a playable web game - e.g. https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook/wasm/chapter-74-darkcity/ ).

There are downsides. If you link with C libraries, chances are you have to come up with some shims to handle the bits of the C library that don’t exist in WASM-land. Also WebGL is almost but not quite compatible with regular GL - so for graphics you’ll have to tweak things a bit.

herbert

herbert

Author of Hands-on Rust

I may have messed up the link, sorry! http://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook/ should work.

Rust is a systems language, so its harder than Python and other very high-level languages. It tries really hard to not surprise you, and once you have the basics down it’s a relatively smooth learning curve. Some things - like threads - are much easier than other languages. Other things like the borrow checker will cause a bit of head-scratching at first.

Where Next?

Popular Frontend topics Top

AstonJ
Here’s a pretty good list of them: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-languages-that-compile-to-JS What’s your favou...
New
AstonJ
Which WebAssembly language/s interest you? I just discovered AssemblyScript (portal | thread) which looks interesting! Here are some of...
New
AstonJ
Wondering if anyone has any thoughts on choosing between these two languages for WebAssembly? I definitely want to explore wasm, and rea...
New
First poster: bot
23.44% of the PRs made by outsiders (not owners/members) get merged. PRs usually closed after 0.17 days (median) ** Based on most recen...
New
mafinar
I (re-)realized I had the book “Modern CSS with Tailwind” bought, never read a page of it until today. With me being a fast reader and th...
New
EngineerHamziey
Hello everyone, is there a website or app that I can use to improve my self Like where there are UI UX designs to practice with and then...
New
mtmattei
A few months ago, Uno Platform unveiled Uno Platform for Figma plugin, a plugin created to turn your high-fidelity Figma design into XAML...
New
SynergyRob
I invented a game of double Chess called Synergy Chess. I am not a coder. I hired someone to write the program. People can play online fo...
New
Reinis
For the last few months I’ve been (re)-learning vanilla CSS. Initially I did not ‘get’ how to structure CSS to take advantage of the ‘cas...
New
DevynClark
Front-end Developer Griffin, USA As a student in college looking for a way to break into Front-end Web Development, the rise of things s...
New

Other popular topics Top

malloryerik
Any thoughts on Svelte? Svelte is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue...
New
AstonJ
You might be thinking we should just ask who’s not using VSCode :joy: however there are some new additions in the space that might give V...
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
AstonJ
I have seen the keycaps I want - they are due for a group-buy this week but won’t be delivered until October next year!!! :rofl: The Ser...
New
Margaret
Hello content creators! Happy new year. What tech topics do you think will be the focus of 2021? My vote for one topic is ethics in tech...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
Maartz
Hi folks, I don’t know if I saw this here but, here’s a new programming language, called Roc Reminds me a bit of Elm and thus Haskell. ...
New
mafinar
This is going to be a long an frequently posted thread. While talking to a friend of mine who has taken data structure and algorithm cou...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: VM Brasseur @vmbrasseur We have a treat for you today! We turn the spotlight onto Open Source as we sit down with V...
New
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New