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We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

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Re: We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

#71

Post by hansonkd »

runarberg wrote: post #66
Aeolun wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost never have a met a person who was equally good at both. Doesn’t that say more around your surroundings? I’ve definitely met people that were equally competent at both (and more competent than most). A lot of things that are important on the front-end are equally important on the back-end and vice versa. Lets add databases and infra while we are at it. The thing is, you need an actually senior engineer for th…

These are totally different skill sets with very different tool chains. Front and backand are as dissimilar as carpentry and cabinetry, or geography and geology, or tailoring and fashion design. On the frontend you need to deliver excellent user experience, deliver accessibility, localization, cater to different—sometimes legacy—browsers. Even if you have a graphic designer, you still need to work with your designers…

You articulated it beautifully.

Re: We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

#72

Post by ehnto »

hansonkd wrote: post #48
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #14

Will just comment that I think there is huge value on having all pieces (front end/back end/apps) on the same language if at all possible, especially for small teams. I've gone the other direction, which is basically "Typescript everywhere", or at least as much as possible, i.e. React on the front end, NodeJS on the backend, and Capacitor for apps (note Capacitor may not be appropriate for all types of apps but in ou…

Hard disagree. Just as I disagree about "full stack" developers. People that call themselves "full stack"are a backend developer that dabbles in frontend or a front end developer that can dabble on the backend. Almost never have a met a person who was equally good at both. Just the same Languages have their strengths. Using a backend language to write your frontend is more or less a waste of developer resources. Chan…

In fairness, the goalposts for frontend dev shifted significantly in the past 10 years.

But also, no one thinks Full-stack developers are experts at everything. We are well aware they are the jack-of-all-trades developer archetype, that's why we hire them. They come in all kinds of shapes like you allude to, more like a starfish of skillsets with varying degrees of skill in each leg.

But perhaps the best thing you get out of the starfish, is you know they'll be able to pick up whatever you throw at them, and they won't complain that that they can't do it because it's not "frontend" or not "backend".

Corallary, good programming is universal. I find people tend to be experts in business domain and framework, regardless of where that lives on the front/back spectrum.

Re: We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

#73

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

hansonkd wrote: post #48
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #14

Will just comment that I think there is huge value on having all pieces (front end/back end/apps) on the same language if at all possible, especially for small teams. I've gone the other direction, which is basically "Typescript everywhere", or at least as much as possible, i.e. React on the front end, NodeJS on the backend, and Capacitor for apps (note Capacitor may not be appropriate for all types of apps but in ou…

Hard disagree. Just as I disagree about "full stack" developers. People that call themselves "full stack"are a backend developer that dabbles in frontend or a front end developer that can dabble on the backend. Almost never have a met a person who was equally good at both. Just the same Languages have their strengths. Using a backend language to write your frontend is more or less a waste of developer resources. Chan…

In my experience, I've seen no benefits (and sizable downsides) to using Python on the backend when the front end is React vs. using Node. There are tons of robust API frameworks for Node, a huge ecosystem, etc. So with Node and Python it's more potayto-potahto, and if that's the case, there are benefits to having everything in Typescript for standard server/client cases.

Note I'm not saying do this everywhere if there is a place where there are clear benefits to using another language. For example, while IMO the difference between Python and Node on the server for standard CRUD type apps is really one of preference, that's not the case for doing something with ML or LLMs, where the ecosystem around Python is much bigger, robust, and more generally familiar to the AI crowd.

Re: We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

#74

Post by xmprt »

Aeolun wrote: post #53
hansonkd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. Just as I disagree about "full stack" developers. People that call themselves "full stack"are a backend developer that dabbles in frontend or a front end developer that can dabble on the backend. Almost never have a met a person who was equally good at both. Just the same Languages have their strengths. Using a backend language to write your frontend is more or less a waste of developer resources. Chan…

> Almost never have a met a person who was equally good at both. Doesn’t that say more around your surroundings? I’ve definitely met people that were equally competent at both (and more competent than most). A lot of things that are important on the front-end are equally important on the back-end and vice versa. Lets add databases and infra while we are at it. The thing is, you need an actually senior engineer for th…

I think a lot of frontend engineers can do backend work and vice versa, but it takes a lot to be very good at both. It's not impossible but also I think it's rare that a backend engineer would voluntarily decide to also become a frontend expert instead of leveling up their backend skills.

Fullstack in my experience arises out of a need by companies and startups to cut costs by having a single engineer do both.

Re: We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

#75

Post by xmprt »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #73
hansonkd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. Just as I disagree about "full stack" developers. People that call themselves "full stack"are a backend developer that dabbles in frontend or a front end developer that can dabble on the backend. Almost never have a met a person who was equally good at both. Just the same Languages have their strengths. Using a backend language to write your frontend is more or less a waste of developer resources. Chan…

In my experience, I've seen no benefits (and sizable downsides) to using Python on the backend when the front end is React vs. using Node. There are tons of robust API frameworks for Node, a huge ecosystem, etc. So with Node and Python it's more potayto-potahto, and if that's the case, there are benefits to having everything in Typescript for standard server/client cases. Note I'm not saying do this everywhere if the…

I think you feel that way because you're comparing Node to Python. Neither of them are particularly good languages for servers. Languages like Go and Java/Kotlin are much better when you're building complicated systems that need to be performant and reliable.

Re: We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

#76

Post by hansonkd »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #73
hansonkd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. Just as I disagree about "full stack" developers. People that call themselves "full stack"are a backend developer that dabbles in frontend or a front end developer that can dabble on the backend. Almost never have a met a person who was equally good at both. Just the same Languages have their strengths. Using a backend language to write your frontend is more or less a waste of developer resources. Chan…

In my experience, I've seen no benefits (and sizable downsides) to using Python on the backend when the front end is React vs. using Node. There are tons of robust API frameworks for Node, a huge ecosystem, etc. So with Node and Python it's more potayto-potahto, and if that's the case, there are benefits to having everything in Typescript for standard server/client cases. Note I'm not saying do this everywhere if the…

TBH the hardest thing for a long time about Node backend engineers isn't that there isn't great frameworks but a lot of times people choose node for the above use case. So developers who write Node backends were some breed of frontend people who chose node because they didn't want to learn another language as opposed to learning the language because it was the best tool for the job.

Anyways recently the typescript backend scene is developing a lot better than even a few years ago. stuff like NextJS becoming more popular and more stable better backend typescript frameworks coming out.

My comment was mostly aimed at using backend languages for frontend as opposed to necessarily targeting Typescript

Re: We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

#77

Post by leetrout »

hansonkd wrote: post #61
golergka wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People that call themselves "full stack"are a backend developer that dabbles in frontend or a front end developer that can dabble on the backend. Almost never have a met a person who was equally good at both. So what? Both of these developers would be able to ship a typical feature in a typical web product by themselves, without back-and-forth with their counterpart all the time, and that's a huge productivity boos…

> So what? Both of these developers would be able to ship a typical feature in a typical web product by themselves, without back-and-forth with their counterpart all the time, and that's a huge productivity boost. Its a short term productivity boost sacrificing for long term maintainability and future productivity. I would take 1 backend engineer + 1 frontend engineer over 3-4 "fullstack engineers" any day of the wee…

What is the sacrifice, specifically?

Re: We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

#78

Post by xmprt »

ucirello wrote: post #56
bitbasher wrote: post #29

Go isn't a very good fit for this kind of thing. I've done it with Rust (Leptos, Dioxus, etc). The wasm binaries are a lot more sane when using Rust. On average, my wasm binary was around 240kb and it compresses really well over the wire.

Why not Zig?

Zig doesn't have a 1.0 release yet so I'd be hesitant to use it on any production projects. I've dabbled in it for some toy projects just to get a feel for the language and so far I think I still prefer Rust although the simplicity of Zig is something I can get behind.

Re: We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

#79

Post by re-thc »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #28
cianuro_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME, the productivity promise falls short. I have found major gains following an integrated framework over multiple code bases with the same language. With the setup you described I just felt I had to write more, even if it was in the same language.

I don't understand your comment. There are plenty of integrated frameworks that work well between Node and React. More importantly, though, you seem to be commenting from the perspective of an individual developer. The biggest productivity gains I've seen is that it makes it much easier for people on different areas of the team to understand and fix/modify parts of the code that they're least familiar. E.g. if I'm a…

> it's much easier if I can just go in quickly and add the field I need

This assumes that just because it's the "same language" it's all the same.

It's especially true in Javascript land where the React setup is vastly different than the Node backend framework setup.

You get bundler differences, ESM/CJS, different versions of Node (or even Bun / Deno), linters or things like decorators, etc... You can be doing "functions" with React and then head to classes and modules with NestJs all of a sudden.

It pretends to be much easier. I've seen lots of real world assume-there's-a-shortcut method that just makes it worse.

Re: We replaced our React front end with Go and WebAssembly

#80

Post by re-thc »

have-a-break wrote: post #51
teg4n_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kotlin is not simple. it has like every language feature in existence

Why do people always mention kotlin, but not Scala? Scala is more similar to traditional Java while letting functional programming shine.

> Why do people always mention kotlin

It's backed by $$$ that have promoted it that way - a "better" Java.

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