3 ms·

> What deep tradeoffs are Solid or Svelte making in exchange for their speed I wonder why so many folks care about performance. I guess it's the only objective

by hbrn 4y ago

> What deep tradeoffs are Solid or Svelte making in exchange for their speed I wonder why so many folks care about performance. I guess it's the only objective thing you can throw in someone's face as an argument. But I think one of the major benefits of Svelte is a better mental model for state management. It hides the right pieces of complexity, while both React and Solid throw them in your face.

josephg 4y ago
> I wonder why so many folks care about performance. Its been shown repeatedly that application performance dramatically moves the needle on retention, eg [1]. Personally I care about it because using slow software makes me feel like I'm ill. And developing slow software makes me feel like I'm bad at my job. Your users have spent thousands of dollars buying hardware that can run billions of operations per second. They do that in order to run your software fast. (If they didn't care about performance, they'd be using old hardware.) Your users didn't spend thousands of dollars buying super fast hardware just to get you off the hook for doing good engineering. Slow software is a sign of sloppy craftsmanship. I hate it. [1] https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/273640/Master_Thesis_Zuniga_grappa.pdf https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/273640/Mast...
- hbrn 4y ago
  I absolutely despise slow software. But what I meant to say is that performance of modern frameworks is comparable. There's a huge UX difference between 250ms and 500ms page render. Not so much between 25ms and 50ms. When I'm looking at Svelte or Vue I care about developer experience way more than their performance compared to React. If performance mattered as much as you're claiming, React would never gain traction. After all, Virtual DOM is pure overhead.
  - josephg 4y ago
    I agree that the performance difference between svelte and vue is negligible most of the time. It might matter more for giant websites - but it’s hard to evaluate that from the microbenchmarks people keep doing. React’s performance has never been that great. The library is large (a cost you pay for even on tiny websites). Time-to-interactive is quite long. And I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen shouldComponentUpdate used in the wild. Most apps just do a full rerender whenever the state changes. React performs well enough when websites are small, and by the time a website is big, people don’t want to change their framework. The users are asked to put up with vaguely sluggish websites. They often aren’t given a lot of choice. I think users bounce from websites due to sloppy performance all the time. But dev teams have no idea how much it happens because it doesn’t show up on metrics. And it’s hard to fix a big, slow react website like new reddit. As they say, you can’t fix a problem with the same thinking that created the problem.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I wonder why so many folks care about owning a fast computer. I guess it's the only objective reason to justify dropping thousands of dollars on a new computer (and ruining the planet) to do the same things they could do on their old hardware, if not for software becoming progressively less efficient.

by hbrn 4y ago

josephg 4y ago

> I wonder why so many folks care about performance. Its been shown repeatedly that application performance dramatically moves the needle on retention, eg [1]. Personally I care about it because using slow software makes me feel like I'm ill. And developing slow software makes me feel like I'm bad at my job. Your users have spent thousands of dollars buying hardware that can run billions of operations per second. They do that in order to run your software fast. (If they didn't care about performance, they'd be using old hardware.) Your users didn't spend thousands of dollars buying super fast hardware just to get you off the hook for doing good engineering. Slow software is a sign of sloppy craftsmanship. I hate it. [1] https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/273640/Master_Thesis_Zuniga_grappa.pdf https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/273640/Mast...

hbrn 4y ago
I absolutely despise slow software. But what I meant to say is that performance of modern frameworks is comparable. There's a huge UX difference between 250ms and 500ms page render. Not so much between 25ms and 50ms. When I'm looking at Svelte or Vue I care about developer experience way more than their performance compared to React. If performance mattered as much as you're claiming, React would never gain traction. After all, Virtual DOM is pure overhead.
- josephg 4y ago
  I agree that the performance difference between svelte and vue is negligible most of the time. It might matter more for giant websites - but it’s hard to evaluate that from the microbenchmarks people keep doing. React’s performance has never been that great. The library is large (a cost you pay for even on tiny websites). Time-to-interactive is quite long. And I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen shouldComponentUpdate used in the wild. Most apps just do a full rerender whenever the state changes. React performs well enough when websites are small, and by the time a website is big, people don’t want to change their framework. The users are asked to put up with vaguely sluggish websites. They often aren’t given a lot of choice. I think users bounce from websites due to sloppy performance all the time. But dev teams have no idea how much it happens because it doesn’t show up on metrics. And it’s hard to fix a big, slow react website like new reddit. As they say, you can’t fix a problem with the same thinking that created the problem.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

I wonder why so many folks care about owning a fast computer. I guess it's the only objective reason to justify dropping thousands of dollars on a new computer (and ruining the planet) to do the same things they could do on their old hardware, if not for software becoming progressively less efficient.