> Do people really want to use such complex, heavyweight languages for scripting?
This is a surprising reaction to me, given the history of Javascript and NodeJS in general, but you're not the only person I've seen bring this up.
Ask yourself, 'do people want to use such a strange, high-level language as Javascript for programming servers?' Of course they do, because the primary factor in choosing a language isn't whether or not it's perfectly suited for a specific task, it's how familiar you are with it and how much tooling you already have built up and available around it.
Being able to program your back-end and front-end in the same language is a massive productivity win. It allows you to do all kinds of cool things with architecture and code reuse, and most importantly you don't need to switch mental contexts as often while you're programming.
So if it was reasonable for JS devs to bring their scripting language to the server, it is just as reasonable for Rust/C++ devs to want to bring their server language to the browser. It's not about the language semantics; if someone is primarily familiar with Rust then they'll be faster building web apps in Rust than they would be in Javascript.
This is a surprising reaction to me, given the history of Javascript and NodeJS in general, but you're not the only person I've seen bring this up.
Ask yourself, 'do people want to use such a strange, high-level language as Javascript for programming servers?' Of course they do, because the primary factor in choosing a language isn't whether or not it's perfectly suited for a specific task, it's how familiar you are with it and how much tooling you already have built up and available around it.
Being able to program your back-end and front-end in the same language is a massive productivity win. It allows you to do all kinds of cool things with architecture and code reuse, and most importantly you don't need to switch mental contexts as often while you're programming.
So if it was reasonable for JS devs to bring their scripting language to the server, it is just as reasonable for Rust/C++ devs to want to bring their server language to the browser. It's not about the language semantics; if someone is primarily familiar with Rust then they'll be faster building web apps in Rust than they would be in Javascript.