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Rust is the future of Front-End development
Rust is a programming language with modern syntax, and it is comparable to C++ in terms of performance and speed. It has been voted the most-loved programming language for more than five years in a row. Rust is becoming increasingly popular. It was used by Mozilla when they rebuilt their CSS engine for Firefox. Some companies have moved away from building services in Go and C++ in favor of Rust.
JavaScript and TypeScript dominate Frond-End development. Historical reason has favored those programming languages and has naturally made them one of the most popular programming languages in the world. They happened to be one of the first programming languages newcomers are learning.
The natural dominance of JavaScript is visible in our browser but also during the development of our Front-End. Tools like Webpack, Babel, EsLint, and more have been written in JavaScript. With NodeJS and NPM, the number of packages and tools for Front-End development has exploded, most written in JavaScript. So why is Rust the future of Front-End development?
Tools have reached their limits with JavaScript
Around 2017, people in the front-end development community complained about the rise in the complexity of front-end tools. The term was JavaScript tool fatigue. Tooling at the beginning was relatively simple, and you had little to do to develop your front end. You could do most of it by concatenating and minimizing your CSS and JavaScript files. Developers could accomplish this with a simple 20 lines script or with a task runner such as Gulp if they had more build logic.
Then, it became more complex to build websites, and the need for tools grew. Running a 20 lines script was relatively fast, and there was no immediate need for improvement. After all, we are talking about a 50ms build here. We have time for that. Now, tools will take not milliseconds but seconds to run. And that is where JavaScript has hit its limit.
