Dev News: Best States for Web Devs, Slint Adds Rust Support

Washington is the best state to be a web developer, followed by Virginia, Maryland, Colorado and California. Web design company Digital Silk ranked the states based on average base salary, remote working statistics and quality of life scales in each state. Quality of life includes considerations such as rent, food and transportation costs. Those factors were then combined into an index score.

Washington ranked 82.6 out of a possible 100 in part because it had the highest average web developer salary of $138,780. The state also scored 10/10 on the index for the amount of web development jobs per 1,000 residents.

Virginia placed second with high scores for the number of remote working opportunities — 22.3% of Virginia’s entire workforce works from home, according to Digital Silk. The base salary for web developers there is the second highest in the country, at $101,060. Maryland ranked third with an average web developer salary of $93,160. The state also had the second-highest number of people working remotely.

Finally, Colorado and California rounded out the top five, with Colorado offering an average web developer salary of $80,270 and nearly 24% of the workforce being remote. California — despite being home to Silicon Valley — pays an average web developer salary of $99,620, but it has the highest cost of living among the top 10 states.

Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey and Utah rounded out the top 10. Of those, Utah had the lowest base web development salary at $61,330, which was mitigated by the lowest cost of living and a 20% remote workforce.

Slint Improves Support for Rust, C++

Slint 1.2 was released this week with more support for microcontrollers and an improved platform API for Rust and C++ that will enable new use cases, the release note said.

Slint is a graphic user interface toolkit for desktop and embedded applications written in Rust, C++, or JavaScript.

The new use cases supported include embedding Slant UI as a plugin in foreign applications, such as digital audio workstations, and developing C++ applications with Slant on microcontrollers, since the majority of microcontroller SDKs are based on C/C++.

There’s also new support for the Espressif IDF framework, which is a C-based SDK that makes it easy to target microcontrollers from the ESP32 family, a type of microcontroller.

Slint 1.2 also adds a new lightweight and experimental LinuxKMS backend.

“Often the user interface on an embedded device is implemented via a single full-screen application,” the Slint team explained. “In such a device, a windowing system like X11 or Wayland adds no value and slows down the device startup.”

The LinuxKMS backend renders directly to the screen with OpenGL or Vulkan using Linux’s KMS/DRI infrastructure, for maximum performance, they added.

Turbo 8 Drops TypeScript

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, announced that he’s dropping TypeScript from Turbo 8, a library commonly used with Rails, in favor of plain old JavaScript.

“By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I’ve seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler,” Heinemeier wrote. “But I’ve never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it’s with great pleasure that I can announce we’re dropping TypeScript from the next big release of Turbo 8.”

👁 Tweet that reads "Days without TypeScript drama: 1"

This argument boils down to how a developer feels about strong typing, which is assigning a data type to a variable or expression. This allows the compiler or interpreter to understand the type of data that is being stored or manipulated, and to ensure that the code is correct. There are two main types of typing:

• Static typing, where the data type of a variable is known at compile time, allows the compiler to check the code for errors before execution.
• Dynamic typing, where the data type of a variable isn’t known until runtime, which means the compiler can’t check for errors before execution.

TypeScript is a statically typed language, while JavaScript is a dynamically typed language.

JavaScript is so capable now, with browsers being able to interpret it without any need for a compiler, Hansson contended.

“TypeScript just gets in the way of that for me. Not just because it requires an explicit compile step, but because it pollutes the code with type gymnastics that add ever so little joy to my development experience, and quite frequently considerable grief,” he wrote.

Needless to say, this led to a debate among frontend developers on social media, but this is an ongoing debate that has even generated academic research.

“Due to its dynamic and flexible nature, however, JS applications often have a reputation for poor software quality,” researchers from the Institute of Software Engineering at the University of Stuttgart noted in their paper. “While the type-safe superset TypeScript (TS) offers features to address these prejudices, there is currently insufficient empirical evidence to broadly support the claim that TS applications exhibit better software quality than JS applications.”