I mean, the simple proof is that Rust has been growing by leaps and bounds in the embedded world, which is the closest to bare metal you get. It’s also being used in the Linux kernel and Windows, and there are several projects building new kernels in pure Rust. So yeah, it’s safe to say that it’s as close to the metal as C.

Also, the comparison to Java is understandable if you’ve only been exposed to Rust by the memes, but it doesn’t hold up in practice. Rust has a lot more syntax than C (although that’s not saying much), but it’s one of the most expressive languages on the market today.

My preferred variation of this is to make it an open question that leaves them in the position of authority, and assumes that they made a deliberate decision.

For example, instead of “Why aren’t you using StandardLib that does 90% of this?”, I would try “Could this be achieved with StandardLib? Seems like it would cover 90% of this”.

Proton Pass already supports passkeys: https://proton.me/support/pass-use-passkeys

I think you would be pleasantly surprised by the direction web dev is moving if you gave it a chance.

For example, I suspect that you think one of the ways the web has gotten shittier is because sites are too bloated and JavaScript frameworks are too heavy and slow.

One of the key takeaways is that, across almost all frameworks and stacks, web dev is moving back to doing as much work on the server-side as possible, while retaining the minimum necessary interactivity via Islands of Interactivity with much lighter JavaScript than what was pushed for the last decade.

I think the point is that they don’t want to have to use a full JS framework (which is what HTMX is) for this behavior.

And this is where HTMX fits in. It’s an elegant and powerful solution to the front-end/back-end split, allowing more of the control logic to operate on the back-end while dynamically loading HTML into their respective places on the front-end.

But for a tech-luddite like me, this was still a bit too much. All I really want to do is swap page fragments using something like AJAX while sticking to semantically correct HTML.

EDIT: Put another way, if you look at HTMX’s "motivation"s:

motivation

• Why should only <a> & <form> be able to make HTTP requests?
• Why should only click & submit events trigger them?
• Why should only GET & POST methods be available?
• Why should you only be able to replace the entire screen?

By removing these constraints, htmx completes HTML as a hypertext

It seems the author only cares about the final bullet, and thinks the first three are reasonable/acceptable limitations.