Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust

cube00

> Look, I don’t know where we are going. As honest as it is I can't risk using this anywhere near production if this is the attitude.

jdw64

Has anyone here tried it?

victorbjorklund

Sounds a lot like Liveview in Phoenix.

lolakutty

Why bother with rust when you can write it in C and ask an LLM to weed out the memory bugs?

jazzypants

Some absolutely great work, but I don't know why you would come up with a new term for a server component (shard). Why not just use the obvious client/server annotations so you don't have to define a novel term for new users?

sc68cal

It's interesting to see that they let you mix markup with logic directly in rust, but I have worries about maintainability. I remember the bad old days of PHP where you'd mix markup with logic directly, even when doing OOP with classes and it really made things more difficult long term.

lackoftactics

I really like the direction Topcoat is going in as a Rails developer. Although it is just a bit itchy to my eyes, it is not acid-level, though. The things that look great are LiveView and getting rid of boilerplate for client-side reactivity

muglug

> Rust is the best general-purpose language for the new world of AI-driven development. Funny, the Python guys say Python is the best general-purpose language for AI and the Go guys say Go is the best general-purpose language for AI etc etc

mbStavola

Hopefully there is still space for Axum to exist too! I like this directionally, but I've really enjoyed my time with Axum.

aslkalska

Honestly Rust is an ugly looking language, I mean it's probably okay if you're coming from C or C++ but if you're coming from say Java, it's horrendous. but then again that probably does not matter at all.

Thaxll

`<button @click=$(|_e| count.increment())>"increment"</button>` What the heck is this.

m00dy

> Rust is the best general-purpose language for the new world of AI-driven development. Hell yeah, been saying this more than 2 years already

Kuyawa

In times of AI the language doesn't matter, not even if the dev can read it or not, what matters is the result, speed, optimization, interoperability, UI/UX adaptability to user expectations I've built apps recently in swift, rust, zig, node with HTML UI (not electron) for MacOS and I care less about the code as the AI agent does a perfect job in all of them, even if I don't see much difference in the results (except HTML which is pretty but weird) Asked the same question to AI and she told me Swift is the best choice for MacOS apps just because it doesn't need C bridges between their kits/libraries and that in itself is an optimization gain Of course Swift in Linux is not the best option, probably the last, in Microsoft probably .NET I don't know, haven't used MS products in twenty years The point is, language selection is best decided on platform optimization, not on personal preference. I guess AI killed language wars?

the_sleaze_

Is there a batteries included Rails for Rust that people go to other than this Topcoat? What is the standard when building a web-app in rust?

devops000

I bet with AI we will complicate existing apps because it is now easier to develop.

excsn

I used to write Leptos, but abandoned it. I hoped the experience would get better, it took a lot of memory just for the language server to validate especially. Web apps become too cumbersome to maintain in bigger distributed teams where we want fast feedback. I think writing web apps in straight rust will always be niche. There's not many frontend devs who write React or Vue who want to write straight Rust just because of safety or performance. That's why I created SnapFire FSR ( https://www.snapfirers.com ), but many examples, to allow frontend devs to develop in their favorite framework (or mixture of). Write Tera templates, Web Components if you don't want to bring in frameworks like I tend to. Don't need to pay massive switching costs which, even with, AI not fun. I found it much better to create and maintain web apps near the markup and language they originated from. You won't find me writing straight Rust for Web Apps unless I need to anymore. I'm going to continue to work on this and switch all my leptos and svelte sites over.

rramon

Topcoat needs an Inertia like React integration + Stylex (type safe CSS) on the frontend imo if you want make it as agent friendly as possible. HTMX, Tailwind etc. are still ok but folks who switch to Rust now do this mostly for easier and safer automation. So if you want to grow the framework better think about React.

pjmlp

Compiled languages with automatic resource management are much more ergonomic for distributed systems, and have faster compilers. Better leave Rust for when any kind of automatic resource management isn't acceptable, either due technical or social reasons. Also here is another point, AI agentic programming is basically using automatic resource management infrastructure. When you are no longer at the steering wheel, if the taxi has manual or automatic is irrelevant to reach the destination.

cogman10

My main critique would be that I dislike the ORM. I'd personally like my ORMs (if I'm going to use them) to be closer and more explicit about the queries that I'm writing. ORMs tend to add a lot of complexity for very little benefit. SQLx is much closer to my cup of tea than Toasty. Underlying DBs have different characteristics, so trying to make an abstraction layer for multiple dbs (including no-sql in the docs) means you are going to run into limitations and abstraction leaks that are hard to square. Correctly using the likes of Dynamodb is very different from correctly using postgres, for example.

dchuk

Funny, I was working with Claude and Astra today ideating on how Loco and topcoat could be integrated for the ultimate modern rails alternative stack