This looks really cool. I'd love to have a library for Rust to make this more seamless. In particular it would be nice to have a "development mode" where you just host the HTML/JS files normally while you're working on them, then flip a production switch when you're ready to have them compiled into the binary. Does go.rice have something like this?
I actually thought that's what Rouille (https://github.com/tomaka/rouille) was, which was mentioned in the blog post, but it looks like just uses the macro from that package (to include the strings), not the actual library even, since at the end of the day he opts for rocket (https://rocket.rs/)
[EDIT] - I didn't address your question about go.rice -- from what I know, it doesn't have this kind of thing built in, and I don't know that it even should... "flipping a production switch" is a pretty application-specific endeavor. Also this sounds like something you should be doing with your build tools..., can't include something in the binary at runtime. Maybe I misunderstood what you were asking.
To clarify, the description for go.rice is:
> go.rice is a Go package that makes working with resources such as html,js,css,images,templates, etc very easy. During development go.rice will load required files directly from disk. Upon deployment it is easy to add all resource files to a executable using the rice tool, without changing the source code for your package. go.rice provides several methods to add resources to a binary.
Actually the include_str! macro is shipped with Rust. The router! macro for setting up the endpoints comes from Rouille.
My question is really geared towards this pain point: the React/JS stuff can be quickly rebuilt for almost instant feedback. But even for a simple app like this example the Rust compilation takes a couple seconds on my system. You have to pay that cost even if you're just updating the JS because it has to be built into the binary. It would be nice if you're not changing the actual Rust code to be able to easily reload your JS without compiling.
Thanks for the clarification! I assumed it was from Rouille... I went back and re-read the area, and he's using Rouille, NOT Rocket -- I didn't notice this the first time through, didn't read closely enough.
Oh I think you absolutely can have that kind of flow -- go.rice DOES support that. Also, I still don't really understand because this problem seems to be easily solved by just changing your build script, or detecting environment at runtime. You could even check for the data, and if it's not present, fall back to disk.
I don't know a library that does it off the top of my head for rust though, since I'm not that familiar with rust dev.
That feature's on my (currently just mental) TODO list for my http-serve crate (https://github.com/scottlamb/http-serve). I want to use it in my moonfire-nvr app.
I'm thinking something a little fancier than include_str! because I want to include a whole subdir of resources, and I probably want to embed the gzipped version (and uncompress into RAM for when there's no "Accept-Encoding: gzip") rather than the reverse.
Assuming I understand you, it would be easy via an interface.
Build an interface for the go.rice (or go-binddata/etc) such that, depending on the environment, it either pulls the file from disk or from memory. Super easy.
I seem to recall seeing a Go library that actually has this functionality built in, but I've got no idea which it was.
