The problem

Imagine you want to build a website (and/or integrate a custom backend), using the firebase provided by Google. You have many options:

• Plain JavaScript with the firebase npm package / SDK
• Flutter / Dart with flutterfire package

• JavaScript frameworks, integration the firebase JS SDK

However, all of the above solutions use languages that are sub-optimal.

In dart, for example, you cannot establish type-safe JavaScript interop. Period. The interop does exist, but for your own custom purposes it requires you authoring (and probably publishing) a Flutter plugin. Then, the types are validated at runtime only, since dart typing is like that, and compiling with optimizations has the potential for the wrong types to 'leak' through your code base.

'Well,' you might respond, 'what about the other JS solutions? They seem pretty standard, being the only solution for many decades.' I would resopnd with the argument, 'Can't we do better?' If you have dealt with npm and large interrelated JS projects before, you have often come up against an error like undefined is not a function. Tracking this errors is relatively time consuming compared with tracking Rust errors, for a few major reasons:

• Rust is compiled and knows everything about your project (not necessarily guarenteed with other compiled languages)
• JavaScript errors primarily happen at runtime (I often encounter SyntaxErrors at runtime, when dynamic programming like eval or appending script tags to the DOM are involved)
• Meta programming is hard to trace errors through in edge cases, which Rust solves quite practically with its implementations of macros.

'Well, how can you use firebase in a stable and debuggable manner?' My answer is: Rust