
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
Rust.
Swift for WebAssembly is not quite there yet…

herbert
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
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.
Popular Frontend topics










Other popular topics










Latest in Frontend
Latest (all)
Categories:
Popular Portals
- /elixir
- /rust
- /wasm
- /ruby
- /erlang
- /phoenix
- /keyboards
- /js
- /rails
- /python
- /security
- /go
- /swift
- /vim
- /clojure
- /java
- /haskell
- /emacs
- /svelte
- /onivim
- /typescript
- /crystal
- /c-plus-plus
- /tailwind
- /kotlin
- /gleam
- /react
- /flutter
- /elm
- /ocaml
- /vscode
- /opensuse
- /ash
- /centos
- /php
- /deepseek
- /scala
- /zig
- /html
- /debian
- /nixos
- /lisp
- /agda
- /sublime-text
- /textmate
- /react-native
- /kubuntu
- /arch-linux
- /revery
- /ubuntu
- /manjaro
- /spring
- /django
- /diversity
- /lua
- /nodejs
- /c
- /julia
- /slackware
- /neovim