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Happened to see this thread on HN, (and disclaimer I'm an engineer at Hex) very cool project jwithington! Wanted to take a second to address your comment about
by jasonkillian 5y ago
Happened to see this thread on HN, (and disclaimer I'm an engineer at Hex) very cool project jwithington!
Wanted to take a second to address your comment about performance, lqet. All your points are absolutely fair - I personally apologize for some of those layers of divs and some of that JS as they're definitely my fault!
For context, Hex lets you write Python and SQL code in a notebook-esque format and then create apps from that to share across the web. So there's actually quite a breadth of functionality we need to support under the hood that adds to frontend complexity. We also revamped our whole app-building experience recently, so there's a couple straggling bugs (like the text selection one you mentioned, whoops!).
But I totally agree with you - thinking about all that JS makes me wince a little haha as we definitely care and want to improve frontend performance. We plan to make better use of code-splitting and lazy-loading of JS so that the frontend code for more complex apps is only pulled in if/when necessary. (We also want to work on building better tooling to make analysis of code-splitting effectiveness easier - we've found that a lot of existing webpack bundle analyzer tools don't provide enough visibility for our use cases. Maybe an open source project for us one day!) And we want to decrease over-the-wire data size and reduce necessary network calls so you can get a faster initial load. We're a small team, so can't make promises when exactly this will all happen, but hopefully with these changes and other improvements things will feel a bit snappier someday soon