September 2022:
This has spread to a far wider audience than I had anticipated - probably my fault for using a title that is in hindsight catnip for link aggregators. I wrote this back in 2021 just as a bunch of personal thoughts of my experiences using Rust over the years (not always well thought through), and don't intend on trying to push them further, outside of personal experiments and projects.
Managing a living language is challenging and difficult work, and I am grateful for all the hard work that the Rust community and contributors put in given the difficult constraints they work within. Many of the things I listed below are not new, and there's been plenty of difficult discussions about many of them over the years, and some are being worked on or postponed, or rejected for various good reasons. For more thoughts, please see my comment below.
tl;dr I built a demo illustrating what it might look like to add async rendering to Facebook's commenting interface, while ensuring it appears on the screen simultaneous to the server-rendered story.
A key benefit of async rendering is that large updates don't block the main thread; instead, the work is spread out and performed during idle periods using cooperative scheduling.
But once you make something async, you introduce the possibility that things may appear on the screen at separate times. Especially when you're dealing with multiple UI frameworks, as is often the case at Facebook.
How do we solve this with React?
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import React from 'react'; | |
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom'; | |
import * as mobx from 'mobx-react'; | |
import {state, actions} from './store'; | |
// passing function to observer (with implicit inject) is not supported natively, so make up your own one | |
// pass either function or plain old selector strings array | |
// WARNING: doesn't work if "observer" used as decorator | |
let observer = (selector, Component) => { |