JS-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals
sgom.es
I’m Sérgio, and I work with Web frontend code. Sometimes I write about it here.
  • kalkulat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    3 days ago

    I can’t speak for the performance of frameworks, but today’s ‘vanilla’ javascript both compiles and executes blisteringly fast. The better-optimized it is, the better. Staying away from modern syntactic sugar may also help.

    I can understand that those who choose to use frameworks may be newcomers, or may have productivity pressures. Neither source of slowdowns can be blamed in JS itself.

    But this headline distorts that reality by leaving out the fact that the article itself is about using JS frameworks. Whatever the ‘long-term performance goals’ may be, writing the fastest code can’t hurt them. Suggesting otherwise is a disservice to JS.

    • dan@upvote.au
      1·
      22 hours ago

      Sites that only use vanilla JS can still be heavy, too. I think the underlying message is to do the heavy processing on the server side, and keep the client side relatively light.

      This is also why frameworks/libraries like Astro and htmx are becoming more popular. Both of them focus on having minimal frontend JS. htmx effectively reverts back to a pattern that was somewhat common 20 years ago - a small amount of reusable JavaScript to handle common use cases, that hits the server and inserts its response HTML somewhere on the page. I was a web developer back then so it’s been interesting to see old patterns come back.