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Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

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Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#21

Post by jitl »

incorrecthorse wrote: post #20

> For the uninitiated, Linear is a project management tool that feels impossibly fast. Click an issue, it opens instantly. Update a status and watch in a second browser, it updates almost as fast as the source. No loading states, no page refreshes - just instant, interactions. How garbage the web has become for a low-latency click action being qualified as "impossibly fast". This is ridiculous.

A web request to a data center even with a very fast backend server will struggle to beat 8ms (120hz display) or even 16ms (60hz display), the budget for next frame painting a navigation. You need to have the data local to the device and ideally already in memory to hit 8ms navigation.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#22

Post by mrkeen »

ivape wrote: post #16
defrost wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's an ad for Linear why is so much text spent on Electric SQL, Zero, and Jazz?

[flagged]

In that worldview, it's unthinkable that you'd come and warn us about ads out of the goodness of your own heart.

Who paid you for these comments? Atlassian?

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#23

Post by jitl »

petralithic wrote: post #18

ElectricSQL and TanStack DB are great, but I wonder why they focus so much on local first for the web over other platforms, as in, I see mobile being the primary local first use case since you may not always have internet. In contrast, typically if you're using a web browser to any capacity, you'll have internet. Also the former technologies are local first in theory but without conflict resolution they can break dow…

Because building local first with web technologies is like infinity harder than building local first with native app toolkits.

Native app is installed and available offline by default. Website needs a bunch of weird shenanigans to use AppManifest or ServiceWorker which is more like a bunch of parts you can maybe use to build available offline.

Native apps can just… make files, read and write from files with whatever 30 year old C code, and the files will be there on your storage. Web you have to fuck around with IndexedDB (total pain in the ass), localStorage (completely insufficient for any serious scale, will drop concurrent writes), or OriginPrivateFileSystem. User needs to visit regularly (at least once a month?) or Apple will erase all the local browser state. You can use JavaScript or hit C code with a wrench until it builds for WASM w/ Emscripten, and even then struggle to make sync C deal with waiting on async web APIs.

Apple has offered CoreData + CloudKit since 2015, a completed first party solution for local apps that sync, no backend required. I’m not a Google enthusiast, maybe Firebase is their equivalent? Idk.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#24

Post by ahofmann »

jitl wrote: post #21
incorrecthorse wrote: post #20

> For the uninitiated, Linear is a project management tool that feels impossibly fast. Click an issue, it opens instantly. Update a status and watch in a second browser, it updates almost as fast as the source. No loading states, no page refreshes - just instant, interactions. How garbage the web has become for a low-latency click action being qualified as "impossibly fast". This is ridiculous.

A web request to a data center even with a very fast backend server will struggle to beat 8ms (120hz display) or even 16ms (60hz display), the budget for next frame painting a navigation. You need to have the data local to the device and ideally already in memory to hit 8ms navigation.

This is not the point, or other numbers matter more, then yours.

In 2005 we wrote entire games for browsers without any frontend framework (jQuery wasn't invented yet) and managed to generate responses in under 80 ms in PHP. Most users had their first bytes in 200 ms and it felt instant to them, because browsers are incredibly fast, when treated right.

So the Internet was indeed much faster then, as opposed to now. Just look at GitHub. They used to be fast. Now they rewrite their frontend in react and it feels sluggish and slow.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#26

Post by terencege »

I'm also building a local first editor and rolling my own CRDTs. There are enormous challenges to make it work. For example the storage size issue mentioned in the blog, I end up using with yjs' approach which only increase the clock for upsertion, and for deletion remove the content and only remain deleted item ids which can be efficiently compressed since most ids are continuous.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#27

Post by mentalgear »

Local-First & Sync-Engines are the future. Here's a great filterable datatable overview of the local-first framework landscape: https://www.localfirst.fm/landscape

My favorite so far is Triplit.dev (which can also be combined with TanStack DB); 2 more I like to explore are PowerSync and NextGraph. Also, the recent LocalFirst Conf has some great videos, currently watching the NextGraph one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaadDmZWIzE).

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#29

Post by Zanfa »

ahofmann wrote: post #24
jitl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A web request to a data center even with a very fast backend server will struggle to beat 8ms (120hz display) or even 16ms (60hz display), the budget for next frame painting a navigation. You need to have the data local to the device and ideally already in memory to hit 8ms navigation.

This is not the point, or other numbers matter more, then yours. In 2005 we wrote entire games for browsers without any frontend framework (jQuery wasn't invented yet) and managed to generate responses in under 80 ms in PHP. Most users had their first bytes in 200 ms and it felt instant to them, because browsers are incredibly fast, when treated right. So the Internet was indeed much faster then, as opposed to now. J…

> Now they rewrite their frontend in react and it feels sluggish and slow.

And decided to drop legacy features such as tags and broke browser navigation in their new code viewer. Right click on a file to open in a new tab doesn’t work.

Re: Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

#30

Post by jddj »

terencege wrote: post #26

I'm also building a local first editor and rolling my own CRDTs. There are enormous challenges to make it work. For example the storage size issue mentioned in the blog, I end up using with yjs' approach which only increase the clock for upsertion, and for deletion remove the content and only remain deleted item ids which can be efficiently compressed since most ids are continuous.

In case you missed it and it's relevant, there was an automerge v3 announcement posted the other day here which claimed some nice compression numbers as well
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