But this also runs in the browser. Using HTML and Javascript. Except now it's done slightly differently in a way that's easier for browsers to optimize, if done well.
WebAssembly and Rust may be massive overkill for most web applications, but so is React or Vue or whatever Javascript framework is popular these days. When the inevitable rewrite happens, we might as well enjoy the benefits of the new, faster-than-the-old-evolved-moloch web UI.
If anything the move from the old system (React+WebAssembly) to the new one (Rust+minimal JS+WebAssembly) will make the web application itself smaller and easier to grasp.
They don't really use browsers. They have basically build their own react-native version, but instead of using system UI as the backend they have a backend abstraction layer with implementations for their own rendering engine or alternatively a browser on platforms that don't support WebAssembly.
They only use WebAssembly rather than native because updating native code typically requires an app update via the platforms update mechanism which is slow and unreliable.
It looks like the new Rust UI version just swaps out their react fork for rust code and it looks like they are dropping browser support altogether.
Rust is no panacea and rewriting a web application in Rust should not lead to any performance gains per se, unless your web application is doing number crunching in the mouse move handler. In most cases, you should be lucky to see no performance hits after a rewrite, because pleasing the borrow checker makes things unnecessarily more complicated.
A valid reason to switch to Rust should be a better developer experience, but it will require lots of upfront effort to realize the benefits. I doubt that it's worth it for small to medium-sized web applications.
Also, React itself is very much lightweight and fast, it's the developers who use it to program slow websites.
I have tested the reactivity difference between the current UI and the Rust rewrite and it is staggeringly faster, this is not just a dumb pet project.
Just to make sure we're on the same page here, this is the app that lets me move a highlighted rectangle using a controller with 300ms latency to select the next episode of Reacher, right?
In my experience of building consumer web applications, they all start fast.
Then someone says “We need to track every interaction in mixpanel. What’s even the point if we don’t know it happened”.
Then the sales team says “We need to track in Salesforce, nobody on our team looks at mixpanel”
Then the marketing team goes “We must consolidate in google analytics, nothing else fits our usecase”
Then the other product team says “We need Amplitude”
Then the re-engagement marketing team goes “Braze for us please, we must know when customers do a thing so we can trigger campaigns”
Then the product growth hacker marketing team says “Our recommendation engine needs to use the custom in-house framework so we can train our models”
Then someone goes “Hey it looks like we’re losing events sometimes, you have to make sure users don’t leave the screen until all events are submitted”
Then someone has a cool idea: “Wow it would be great if we could see where users are looking with something like Hotjar”
And now you have an app where every interaction triggers 20 different trackers, waits for all of them to settle, then reacts to your action. Just look at the AWS homepage one day – I once counted 70 requests blocked by Brave’s built-in blockers before I even moved my mouse. It’s slightly better after login – only a dozen or so tracker requests iirc.
I wouldn't trust anyone saying that a Roku "runs great" in any fashion. This is the slowest piece of sh* hardware I ever had the displeasure to use, the waiting times when switching apps are insane. Typing was a dreaded galore, I would plug my laptop over hdmi whenever I could instead. Every interaction in such a device should always be 100% less-than-a-frame instantaneous.
Not sure loading megabytes of Rust-transpiled webassembly is going to speed up those app switching times, but I feel your pain. As a Roku dev there are many hardware variants. Roku requires you to support the ancient ones. It sucks.
My experience with Flutter applications in the browser is absolutely terrible. Rather unfortunate, as the things Flutter promised would make it excellent for web applications like these.
The concept behind the way these platform renders is very similar, so the new Amazon UI may be terrible as well, but I wouldn't expect whoever made the GUI framework they use now to make the same mistakes Flutter made.
Edit: after looking into this some more, it looks like the approach Amazon took is quite different from most Rust UI libraries. They have written their own framework that basically re-implements React but entirely on the WebAssembly side. I don't think it works by throwing a <canvas> onto the screen and implementing a browser rendering engine in JS+WASM like Flutter does. They also seem to target native code where they do all the rendering themselves, but probably faster because they control all the layers and don't need to build a general-purpose UI engine for their video player with extra steps.
> … but also in browsers because some living room devices today have just an HTML5 browser and don't even have flash space big enough to put our native C++ engine.
Ask the people buying and making those devices, not the people trying to get their services to work on them.
The answer is probably "because the alternative is worse". I too would rather make a single web app than separate Tizen/tvOS/WebOS/Android/whatever Roku runs apps.
My latest bad experience was whatever version fluffychat used last December, thst was the most recent time I've tried to make a web app work for me. Before that, every version of Flutter I've tried myself, both in debug and release builds. The UI is stuttery and unresponsive in a way that's not happening in mobile platforms, although even on desktop platforms I find the latency rather high. That also includes some rather small Flutter desktop+web applications I've written myself.
It seems like Flutter apps run better in Chrome, but I'm on Firefox. Could be a Flutter optimisation issue or something in Flutter triggering a Firefox bug. Whatever it is, it's making me avoid Flutter web apps.
It's a similar effort. Flutter is a cross platform Dart UI framework that compiles to WASM for the web and also has Android/iOS build targets. The web version can be laggy on trivial examples. I would guess this younger Rust framework is less featureful than Flutter but is more efficient/faster (one of the stated goals in the article).
Rust is finding itself everywhere. It's fantastic on the server. It's shaping up to be fantastic for UI.
It's fast, ergonomic, and the code has fewer defects than code written in other languages. (Google did a study on this.)
It's not as unapproachable as the memes make it seem. It's no harder or less productive than Java or Golang to write. (Google also did a study on this.)
The Rust WASM deploy story is sublime and is going to help it take over the world.
is it just me or does the prime video player seem to have a bug in chrome where the UI shows over the video and never goes away after pausing in full screen?
This isn't about someone building this as a side-project, it's something Prime Video is working on. Which would be clear if you had even just opened the article.
My main issue is having to buy my parents a bigger TV every few years because the fonts keep getting smaller and their eyes keep getting worse.