7 min read

I recently discovered a really cool front-end framework written in Rust called Yew. I feel like it’s a spiritual cross between the functional language Elm and React.

This is a long post, so I’m going to provide a list of contents

Background

Before I talk about Yew, let’s start off talking about React since a lot of front end engineers know React very well

React is undeniably one of the largest front-end frameworks at the moment, and it’s currently my first choice if I need to build a website, but unfortuanately it uses JavaScript (or TypeScript).

What’s so bad about that? After working on front end projects professionally for a few months, I’ve learnt that I really do not like working with Js. A lot of people do, and that’s fine, but I’ve tried and I just can’t learn to love it. There’s probably an entire post about what I dislike about js so I’m not going to go into the details here.

How does React work?

On a surface level, React works by having a ‘virtual DOM’ (or VDOM), a js representation of the current web page. It then uses this VDOM to figure out which functions to run on specific events and which elements to update, if any. If used correctly, it can and will only call functions if there’s content that needs to be updated.

How does Yew differ?

Yew is built upon Rust, which is a very modern imperitive language but with a lot of functional aspects. It’s been shown to be extremely fast, very memory efficient and very memory safe.

Yew works very similar to React. As a demonstration, let’s make a Button component in both React and Yew

React

class Button extends React . Component { constructor ( props ) { super ( props ); this . state = { clicked : false , }; this . handleClick . bind ( this ) } handleClick () { if ( ! this . state . clicked ) { this . props . onClick (); this . setState ({ clicked : true , }) } } render () { if ( this . state . clicked ) { return < p > Clicked ! </ p >; } else { return < button onClick = { this . handleClick }> { this . props . value } </ button > } } }

Yew

pub struct Button { clicked: bool , props: ButtonProps link: ComponentLink < Self > , } #[derive(Properties)] pub struct ButtonProps { onclick: Callback < MouseEvent > , value: String, } enum Msg { Click(MouseEvent), } impl Component for Button { type Properties = ButtonProps; type Message = Msg; fn create ( props: Self ::Properties, link: ComponentLink < Self > ) -> Self { Button { clicked: false , props, link } } fn update ( & mut self, msg: Self ::Message) -> ShouldRender { match (self.clicked, msg) { ( false , Msg::Clicked( let event)) => { self.props.onclick.emit(event); self.clicked = true ; true }, _ => false , } } fn view ( & self) -> Html { if self.clicked { html ! { < p > { "Clicked!" } </ p > } } else { let onclick = self.link.callback( | event | Msg::Click(event) ); html ! { < button onclick = onclick > {self.props.value} </ button > } } } }

Realistically, they’re quite similar. Both examples have a type that is a component. They both have a render function that returns HTML formatted code. And they each have an update function.

In Yew’s case, everything is a little more specific, however it’s not too verbose. It would be similar situation if you were using TypeScript with React.

This is great for me. I’m not a fan of JS but I like React. Yew lets me use the same concepts as React but in a language I am more fond of.

What are the downsides of Yew?

Currently, there is no agreed upon way of styling components in Yew. Of course you can create static stylesheets and reference those classnames. However, React has shown that dynamic stylesheets can be useful and are very popular. And systems like Less and Sass show that CSS can be a lot more powerful than it is.

What am I doing about it?

I’ve been working on an addition to Yew in my own time with a CSS macro. Currently it can parse expressions like

let height = 100 ; let (button, container); let stylesheet = css ! { $button { width: 10 ; height: 100 * percent; } $container { height: height * px; } $container .a { color: "red" ; text - decoration: "underlined" ; } };

This sets the two variables button and container and stylesheet is a String that would be the compiled version of those styles. The value in the style is evaluated as a standard rust expression, so it supports variables and calculations without anything complicated.

There are a few limitation to Rust macros that make this slightly awkward however. Take this example

.a .b { color : red ; }

is a different style to

.a.b { color : red ; }

However, in rust, there’s no way to differentiate .a.b with .a .b , infact, what we actually parse is . a . b or as a token stream Punct(".") Ident("a") Punct(".") Ident("b") . This is clearly a problem. I’ve decided that I will take inspiration from nested css syntax to make this work

.a { & .b { color : red ; } }

will be the same as

.a & .b { color : red ; }

which will represent an element with both classes a and b

whereas

.a .b { color : red ; }

will represent an element with class a that contains an element with class b .

I do also want to support a basic form of nested CSS, since that isn’t too hard to parse.

Compile time checking

I eventually want to make the library do compile time checks and automatic prefixing. For example,

css ! { div { width: "red" ; } }

Wouldn’t cause the website to crash, but it wouldn’t render correctly. This is a bug. Since types in rust have to be known at compile time, we could use this to our advantage.

A css width value could only accept values that conform to Into<Width> or T: Width (I’m unsure of whether to use a type or a trait as of yet). Infact, colours could be the same. They will only accept values like color::red or (255, 0, 0) or color::hsl(0.0, 1.0, 0.5)

As for prefixing, that would be rather simple. A value of type BoxShadow could generate 2 css values evaluated instead of just the one.

css ! { div { box - shadow: BoxShadow { offset: ( 0 , 0 ), blur: 2 , spread: 2 , color: color ::black, }; } }

could evaluate into

div { box-shadow : 0 0 2px 2px black ; -webkit-box-shadow : 0 0 2px 2px black ; }

This would require a lot of work, however. And it might make the compiler quite slow since it has a lot of checks to perform. I guess it could be an opt in config feature, but it avoids the need of another linter.

It also can be restrictive if this library falls behind the current CSS standards. It would need to be configurable and extendable by the user.

The front end updates fast because the frameworks of React and Yew only update the DOM objects that have actually been updated. This is possible because it’s relatively easy to take the difference of a tree and elements in the browser are directly referenceable.

CSS does not work this way. CSS is not a tree structure, it’s a linear structure. So it’s possible to have styles like

.a , .b { color : black ; } .a { color : red ; } .a { color : black ; } .a { color : black ; }

and this isn’t an issue. However, how should the library process this to reduce the footprint, and, how should it react if I want to update the third style block to contain color: red from within a component.

I could render each component’s style in a style element along side the content it’s styling, but that would be messy for when you’re looking through the inspector.

I could do something similar, where each component gets their own style element but stored in the head instead. I think this is the most sensible solution at the moment but I need to do more research into how exactly the libraries like emotion and Material UI in React work.

There’s one final thing, unique class names. That should be an easy thing to solve. Any time a variable selector name is used, it can access a global pointer and increment it and append that number to the class name.

For obfuscated classes in a production environment, I could also use a random start value and a hash to convert the counter into a string of 5 upper or lowercase characters, but this isn’t a crucial addition.

Conclusion

Anyway, this is a fun project to work on regardless. I’m learning a lot more about how the internals of web frameworks work and about the finer details of precedural rust macros.