[dherman]

Neon maintainer here, happy to answer any questions folks might have!

It's a pretty exciting time for Neon. We're nearly feature-complete for a 1.0 release, which will come with a bunch of benefits and should help us build momentum for future improvements:

  * No more legacy backend -- just one simple and clean way to use Neon, fully audited for safety.
  * Strong ABI and API stability guarantees.
  * Convenient APIs for general-purpose multithreading and creating custom async Node events.
  * Ergonomic and modern use of JS promises, which interact beautifully with async Rust code.

Some of the things I'm looking forward to exploring post-1.0 is even more ergonomics and performance improvements.

[gravypod]

Is there a way to generate automatic bindings for rust/js code from the AST of the language and a list of definitions to specify? I'm imaging how powerful a Bazel ruleset for this could be. Something like

  js_rust_library(... defs = ["someFunction"] ...)

[dherman]

That's a cool idea! The closest thing today is probably neon-serde, a cool community library that lets you generate bindings from lightweight Rust annotations:

    https://docs.rs/neon-serde2/0.8.0/neon_serde2/

Another thing I'd love to explore is using TypeScript declarations (e.g. from a .d.ts file) to auto-generate bindings.

If you're interested in playing with any of these ideas feel free to hop onto our community Slack and chat!

[ukulele]

Thank you for building it! I haven't kicked the tires yet, but as a node developer, this feels like the future: we can move fast with node when it makes sense, and get rust level performance when we need to. Best of both worlds!

[flohofwoe]

Did you consider compiling to WASM/WASI, and if yes, what were the reason to go with native DLLs?

[skwee357]

I assume this question was directed at me (author of the post).

I've considered it. But honestly, I don't know a lot about WASM (I should explore it more), so I haven't compiled it to WASM. Maybe some members of the community can provide more insights.

It is definitely something I'll try to check at some point later.

[dherman]

In case it was directed at me, I’ll say yes, it’s on my mind, but my first goal was to have the full power of the entire OS facilities, the full Cargo ecosystem, and full native performance with the safety of Rust. That said, I think wasm has still only just begun to take off and it’s on my radar.

[skwee357]

I just wanted to say: Thank you! Neon is great!