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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

#51

Post by Fnoord »

dewey wrote: post #11
ivape wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think marketing is not sophisticated? Here I’ll offer my services. I’ll pretend to do a technical deep dive of your app for X amount. No one will know, I’ll just act super interested. When the fuck did anyone ever go “omg this web app so impressive”, never, ever, never, ever.

It’s a choice to always see the worst in everything. Many blog post submissions here are someone diving into something they like, hardware, software, tool etc. and it’s just because people like to share.

Yep, but LLMs being used as aid in writing blog posts is a relatively new phenomenon.

I'm on the fence. IMO ivape provides a hypothesis, but brings it as fact. That isn't a good starting point for a discussion (though a common mistake), but that doesn't prove they are wrong either. Btw, I believe the HN guidelines encourage you to take the positive angle, at least for comments.

As for the topic at hand local-first means he end up with a cache; either in memory or on disk. If you got the RAM and NVMe you might as well use it for performance. Back in the days not much could be cached, but your connection was often too lousy or not 24/7. So you ended up with software distribution via 3.5 inch floppies or CDROM. Larger distributions used gigantic disk cache either centralized (Usenet) or distributed (BitTorrent). But the 'you might as well use it' issue is it introduces sloppiness. If you develop with huge constraints you are disciplined into deterrence to start, failing, or succeeding efficiently. We hary ever hear about all the deterrence and failing.

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

#52

Post by b_e_n_t_o_n »

Local first is super interesting and absolutely needed - I think most of the bugs I run into with web apps have to do with sync, exacerbated by poor internet connectivity. The local properties don't interest me as much as request ordering and explicit transactions. You aren't guaranteed that requests resolve in order, and thus can result in a lot of inconsistencies. These local-first sync abstractions are a bit like bringing a bazooka to a water gun fight - it would be interesting to see some halfway approaches to this problem.

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

#55

Post by fleabitdev »

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.

I was also surprised to read this, because Linear has always felt a little sluggish to me.

I just profiled it to double-check. On an M4 MacBook Pro, clicking between the "Inbox" and "My issues" tabs takes about 100ms to 150ms. Opening an issue, or navigating from an issue back to the list of issues, takes about 80ms. Each navigation includes one function call which blocks the main thread for 50ms - perhaps a React rendering function?

Linear has done very good work to optimise away network activity, but their performance bottleneck has now moved elsewhere. They've already made impressive improvements over the status quo (about 500ms to 1500ms for most dynamic content), so it would be great to see them close that last gap and achieve single-frame responsiveness.

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

#56

Post by andy99 »

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.

I also winced at "impossibly fast" and realize that it must refer to some technical perspective that is lost on most users. I'm not a front end dev, I use linear, I'd say I didn't notice speed, it seems to work about the same as any other web app. I don't doubt it's got cool optimizations, but I think they're lost on most people that use it. (I don't mean to say optimization isn't cool)

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

#57

Post by WickyNilliams »

yanis_t wrote: post #43

I don't get it. You still have to sync the state one way or another, network latency is still there.

The latency is off the critical path with local first. You sync changes over the network sure, but your local mutations are stored directly and immediately in a local DB.

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

#59

Post by mattsahr »

mrkeen wrote: post #22
ivape wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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?

That's an interesting question. I will open a Jira ticket to schedule a meeting with the Product Team, and they will assign you several stories with acceptance criteria written by AI.

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

#60

Post by dustingetz »

mentalgear wrote: post #28
mkarliner wrote: post #25

Meteor was/is a very similar technology. And I did some fairly major projects with it.

Meteor was amazing, I don't understand why it never got sustainable traction.

non-relational, document oriented pubsub architecture based on MongoDB, good for not much more than chat apps. For toy apps (in 2012-2016) – use firebase (also for chat apps), for crud-spectrum and enterprise apps - use sql. And then React happened and consumed the entire spectrum of frontend architectures, bringing us to GraphQL, which didn't, but the hype wave left little oxygen remaining for anything else. (Even if it had, still Meteor was not better.)
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