Rust: The Benefits for Front-End Devs
In 2024, Rust continues to prove itself as a powerful and efficient choice for modern software development: a ‘perfect’ combination of C++ speed and JS’ high-level safety.
However, some front-end web developers have no experience of low level languages like C++ or Rust. Having only heard of the Rust language being used in gaming, they ask “What are the practical uses of Rust?”
Well, Rust is a systems language, designed for writing systems software. Therefore, Rust is highly desired and preferred by backend-developers. But the advantages for using it in the front-end aren’t always impressive or immediately obvious.
What are the practical benefits of using Rust in the front-end?
Type System
The Rust type system is often celebrated for its expressiveness and safety guarantees.
- Rust’s Type System is Very Expressive
Rust’s pattern matching capabilities are extensive and allow for concise and expressive code.
Rust’s type system allows for zero-cost abstractions, meaning that high-level constructs like generics and traits are optimised away by the compiler, resulting in performance comparable to handcrafted code. This enables developers to write expressive and generic code without sacrificing performance.
Additionally, Rust’s enums are more powerful than those found in other languages: they contain data, similar to algebraic data types (ADTs) in functional programming languages. This allows Rust to represent complex data structures and states in a type-safe and concise manner.
- Rust’s Type System is Powerful and makes it hard to ignore errors
Rust’s ownership model allows Rust to enforce rules at compile time, preventing common issues like null pointer dereferencing, data races, and memory leaks. Borrowing rules enable multiple references to data with strict compile-time checks, ensuring data integrity without sacrificing performance.
Rust’s type system enforces concurrency safety by preventing data races and ensuring thread safety at compile time. This is achieved through the ownership and borrowing model we previously mentioned.
Lifetime System
Rust’s lifetime system is a fundamental aspect of its ownership model. The system enables advanced optimisations by providing the compiler with additional information about the lifetime of data.
Rust is able to optimise at a more advanced level than other programming languages through static analysis, the borrow checker component of Rust’s compiler, lifetime elision rules, lifetime parameters, and lifetime inference.
Memory Safety
In C++ applications, there are often cases when manual freeing of memory isn’t considered in the code in advance, leading to memory leaks. The longer the system exists, the more memory it starts using. This memory use will grow until the system memory is completely exhausted. Eventually, the system gets stuck and reboots. System rebooting may happen at any time, causing inconveniences for the business and system users. Rust on the other hand, doesn’t have a garbage collector (a tool for freeing application memory by gathering unused memory), so it doesn’t have this issue. And the lack of garbage collector also frees up runtime, where other programming languages cannot.
Handle Complex Data
Rust is very “serious” about correctness enabling it o handle complex data safely. One way that Rust takes an approach focused on “correctness” is by allowing safe concurrent programming through the Rust ownership model, which ensures that multiple threads cannot simultaneously mutate the same data. This eliminates a whole class of bugs related to concurrent access to shared data, which are common in languages like Java and Python.
Alongside its ownership model Rust has a strong community culture that emphasises code correctness, safety and reliability. Best practices and coding conversations are widely shared and enforced, contributing to a collective mindset hyper-focused on writing code that is correct.
No More Native
Rust is useful for the kinds of application that so far have been written as native apps. They would have likely been written as native because JS was too slow for them or has too much memory overhead.
You can write a game engine or an image/video/audio ending application or codec in Rust, because you can create complex data files (e.g. compressed ZIP or tarball) purely client-side in an off-line webapp.
WebAssembly
WebAssembly (Wasm)is a binary instruction format designed to execute at native speed in web browsers. It is an open standard developed by a W3C community group with representatives from major browser vendors, including Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple.
WebAssembly has been described as “The future of Front-End Development” because delivery binary directly to the browser (as WebAssembly does) allows e-commerce solutions, that simply doesn’t exist today.
Learning Rust as a front-end developer will give you a head start when WebAssembly takes off for four reasons.
- Rust is known for its performance and memory safety features. Since WebAssembly is a low-level byte code that runs in the browser, it’s crucial to write efficient code.
- Rust’s interoperability wth WebAssembly is excellent – it can be compiled directly into WebAssembly without needing an intermediary language or runtime. Meaning that you can write Rust code and seamlessly compile it to WebAssembly to run in the browser.
- WebAssembly doesn’t have direct access to the DOM or other browser APIs, instead, it interacts with JavaScript through defined interfaces. Rust’s ownership model and memory safety features make it easier to manage memory and resources (crucial when working with WebAssembly.)
- Rust has a growing ecosystem of tools and libraries that support WebAssembly development. This includes libraries for interacting with JavaScript, manipulating the DOM, and even frameworks like Yew that allow you to build web applications entirely in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly.
In conclusion, Rust is perfect when a lot of computation is needed. It’s type system, lifetime system and memory safety is what allows Rust to handle and convey complex data. In contrast to other programming languages at a similar level, Rust can be used in applications which have previously been written as native apps.
Specifically for Front-End Development, Rust will give developers the capability to effectively add WebAssembly to their suite. As WebAssembly becomes more prominence it will open new doors for e-commerce businesses by providing solutions that simply aren’t available today.
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At Adapt Talent, our recruitment agency specialises in rust. Dorigan, our Rust specialist, is always open to chat, if you are a front-end developer looking to scope out the Rust market contact us today!
