You might find https://data-star.dev/ interesting, it takes some of the modern approaches (signals, etc) and mixes it with the efficiency of sending straight-up HTML, htmx style. It's very similar to using Alpine + htmx together.

Small customized config also means smaller and more precise changes. I haven't touched mine in quite a long time, only usually to add that cool trick or plugin that pops up every so often.

That being said, Neovim, once you get it set up, is great. The biggest hurdle for me was the config, but if you just start from scratch and make a light config (mines about 200-300 lines, with LSP, hints, etc) you can get through it. And you never have to touch it again, since most likely you configured it in a way you like. Well unless you wanna add the occasional plugin. There are also distros of Neovim that contain a fully baked IDE-lite experience, but honestly those have extremely complicated config, and often IME don't feel nice and light.

It's definitely not for everyone. There is that time investment to get started, but it's definitely been worth it for me.

My config: https://github.com/wrapperup/nvim-config

There's also WASM, which is slowly gaining steam, but it still isn't a first class citizen like JS is.

You can also do the same in Node if you want to, I currently have a TS website that is mostly templated HTML in production (without htmx). Htmx would be perfect for that site.

I'm currently writing a website that contains user generated content for a game, kinda like Steam Workshop.

But I am working on a simple web bundler crate similar to vite to alleviate that (check out the htmx discord!). It's missing the HMR part for assets that can be hot reloaded (it just refreshes your browser), but this will improve things quite a bit for anyone making templated SSR Rust sites.

Otherwise, the backend ecosystem is really fantastic in Rust, not much to complain about. Axum is great, and I'm using cornucopia for SQL. Having the type safety is a killer feature.

Astro is another one that is server-first, similar to PHP, so maybe you'll like that. It also has integrations with the popular frontend frameworks.

And if you don't like any of that, htmx is great!

But recently (and maybe you're already familiar), a library called htmx started gaining popularity, which you might like. It doesn't require a build step, npm or node to use it. I'm using it with a Rust-based monolithic website to great success, but you can use it with any backend in any language you like.

I tried it again about half a year ago with a much leaner, custom lazy (plugin manager, not LazyVim) setup, and now it's my main IDE for everything except C++ (clangd sucks, sorry)

It took me less than a day to get a decent config, and now I rarely touch it (occasionally there may be a nice plugin to throw in). Config is about 2-300 lines, with LSP (rust, typescript), harpoon, oil.nvim telescope, etc. Works great.

He previously was also leading the charge on Unity DOTS, though unfortunately it seems Unity is having a tailspin at the moment. The work on DOTS is solid, if incomplete.

How about vscode vs sublime, neovim, or any other native text editor with LSP support? vscode is slow comparatively.

Of course, there is some object-orientedness to it, the author even calls part of his new code "objects". I guess some people would call that OOP, but it's certainly not traditional OOP.

Rust does a really nice job of making that the first obvious thing to reach for (simple structs, traits and generics), and making the slower stuff like dyn traits (v-table indirection) more annoying and less desired. Reducing indirection and abstractions makes it easier to reason about code.

The latest of which was Iris (to be fair, it is in an early state, but it is a major improvement to ue4's replication), there are some baffling design choices that deliberately made it way harder to make custom serializers for networking.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows. It mostly depends on if you walk the well trodden path or not.