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Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

yoyo-code.com

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Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#31
post #5
post #4

Githubs performance has been rapidly degrading ever since they started rewriting everything in React. It's basically impossible to view diffs now because they often fail to load, render correctly, or just are incredibly slow.

Were they using vanilla js? That's impressive if yes.

[deleted]

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#32
Using the symbol explorer (or whatever it’s called) on files is nice for following definitions through files, but it makes the browser back button completely non-functional. Often the URL will actually change to the previous history state, but the page content never changes. Trying to then reload with the changed URL also doesn’t work for whatever reason.

It would be a really great feature if it worked correctly.

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#33
Reminds me of a discussion that Casey Muratori and Robert Martin had over clean code and it's impact on performance... but not because of the subject matter. They were using GitHub as a medium for their discussion, and they ran into some serious lag when typing paragraphs into just the hundreds of characters (ctrl+f emoji, ~1/4 of the way through):

https://github.com/unclebob/cmuratori-discussion/blob/main/c...

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#34
Obviously if you use any kind of javascript on such website things go to hell. Git solutions are Forgejo are running circles around gitlab and github, it renders everything insanely fast.

Disappointing devs still try to justify javascript on large sites like git.

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#35
post #6

It's very obvious that they've unleashed a bunch of very junior developers on front end, it's I'm surprised that it still works. The previous AJAXed implementation had its haters, but at least it was very close to bare HTML on HTTP.

Sometimes things already don't work. For example recently, I used Firefox and couldn't create an organization. It would just hang, when I clicked the green button to create it. Not sure how they could mess that one up, but when I used Chromium, it worked. It should be as simple as sending a form, but somehow they f'ed that up.

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#36
post #4

Githubs performance has been rapidly degrading ever since they started rewriting everything in React. It's basically impossible to view diffs now because they often fail to load, render correctly, or just are incredibly slow.

I particularly appreciate when the diff is the addition of a new file and it still takes forever to compute a diff or whatever it’s doing behind the scenes.

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#37
post #25
post #6

It's very obvious that they've unleashed a bunch of very junior developers on front end, it's I'm surprised that it still works. The previous AJAXed implementation had its haters, but at least it was very close to bare HTML on HTTP.

Maybe they have given most of the development over to AI?

The performance degradation started before the AI boom imo

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#38
post #6

It's very obvious that they've unleashed a bunch of very junior developers on front end, it's I'm surprised that it still works. The previous AJAXed implementation had its haters, but at least it was very close to bare HTML on HTTP.

Sometimes things already don't work. For example recently, I used Firefox and couldn't create an organization. It would just hang, when I clicked the green button to create it. Not sure how they could mess that one up, but when I used Chromium, it worked. It should be as simple as sending a form, but somehow they f'ed that up.

Using ctrl+enter to open issues in a new tab... How on earth could you break this?

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were, and still very much are, using web components. But they hired a team to do experiments to imagine the future of GitHub UI, and that team built everything in React. Now that team's work is being ported to the production UI.

Just use that thing that renders React 1000x faster, million JS or something

it has some limitations: https://old.million.dev/docs/manual-mode/block#breaking-rule... and it isn't a silver bullet on its own
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