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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

#161
post #120

Early in the post: > As a small team, we need to ship fast. So they chose a solution that required them to: > Spent almost a month prototyping > there was no real ecosystem for Go-app UI components and we knew we’d have to write our own > Go WASM is slow at parsing large amounts of JSON, which led to dramatic architecture Not sure what their definition of shipping fast is, since this just sounds like resume oriented…

What could this company possibly doing that can't be handled by react or Vue or Vanilla or whatever the myriad other ones are?

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

#162
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Go causes large binaries?

Probably that Go has to ship heavier runtime (with its own GC etc)

Probably that. Kotlin waited until wasm GC was available and now has a compiler that relies on that. Kotlin wasm binaries can be pretty small depending on what libraries you use.

Probably a bit of work but there should be no reason why Go would not be able to do the same at this point.

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

#164
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I spent a lot of time figuring out how to render 200k+ lines of log output without crashing. This led to optimizations deep in our virtual terminal rendering library... Interesting. I have two wildly different takes on this. 1) Dagger is such an interesting company that they let developers do whatever they want, as long as it works and works well. A good mix of pragmatism and fun. 2) Holy crap, it's a real company…

The adults would make a quarterly plan, schedule 16 hours of meeting each week, 4x the head count and put everyone into a silo. And then nothing gets done except next quarter.

Is it? What if instead it was another “We did a full rewrite and it was a mistake. Here is why” type of postmortem?

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

#165
>We had some very good reasons to do it: a team of strong Go engineers; a complex UI that TypeScript/React didn't scale well for;

After going though demo a bit, I can see this is what they wanted to say here: we have a team of strong Go engineers who are not that strong when it comes to web frontend, the smells of it are everywhere. The signup page don't fit in the screen and have empty scrollable space around it. Every click inside the dashboard is a spinner on the whole screen with waiting for page reload. Even icons are showing their alt-texts while loading. These are all smells of just low-experience web application, but it's relieving to say React didn't scale

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

#168
post #120

Early in the post: > As a small team, we need to ship fast. So they chose a solution that required them to: > Spent almost a month prototyping > there was no real ecosystem for Go-app UI components and we knew we’d have to write our own > Go WASM is slow at parsing large amounts of JSON, which led to dramatic architecture Not sure what their definition of shipping fast is, since this just sounds like resume oriented…

It simply means that, for their purposes, React wasn't good enough. Personally, I applaud any effort that doesn't use React.

>We had some very good reasons to do it: a team of strong Go engineers; a complex UI that TypeScript/React didn't scale well for

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

#169
post #165

>We had some very good reasons to do it: a team of strong Go engineers; a complex UI that TypeScript/React didn't scale well for; After going though demo a bit, I can see this is what they wanted to say here: we have a team of strong Go engineers who are not that strong when it comes to web frontend, the smells of it are everywhere. The signup page don't fit in the screen and have empty scrollable space around it. Ev…

Web developers without mobile experience have been using React Native to create smelly mobile apps for a long time now, and it's still growing

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

#170
post #165

>We had some very good reasons to do it: a team of strong Go engineers; a complex UI that TypeScript/React didn't scale well for; After going though demo a bit, I can see this is what they wanted to say here: we have a team of strong Go engineers who are not that strong when it comes to web frontend, the smells of it are everywhere. The signup page don't fit in the screen and have empty scrollable space around it. Ev…

Web developers without mobile experience have been using React Native to create smelly mobile apps for a long time now, and it's still growing

Mobile experience is two distinct Java/ObjC worlds, so creating smelly apps on web technologies is justified by that.
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