3 ms·

The author's entire section on "Real Reactivity" hit quite close to home. I recently played around with using https://reactpixi.org/ https://reactpixi.org/ to

The author's entire section on "Real Reactivity" hit quite close to home. I recently played around with using https://reactpixi.org/ https://reactpixi.org/ to build a simple ant farm simulation (https://meomix.github.io/antfarm/ https://meomix.github.io/antfarm/) and was left disappointed regarding rendering performance, but not surprised. It's a real challenge to get strong numbers when stacking a declarative wrapper on an imperative base. I found myself fighting React's reconciler for performance almost immediately. I was talking to my coworkers about the issue and one of them suggested trying to use react-three-fiber and just force it to render 2D, but, as the author notes, the problem feels intractable with competing layers of abstraction. I'm really excited to learn about this library. I feel that I was between a rock and a place with my web-first, declarative graphics tooling. I was pushing myself to learn Rust, to use Bevvy, to have a well-supported, declarative framework, but I felt I would prototype quicker if I stuck with JavaScript. I considered A-Frame, but it's really not about 2D rendering at all with its VR-first approach. There's really quite a desert of modern, active, declarative, web-first graphics rendering frameworks. Stoked for UseGPU to hit 1.0!

unconed 4y ago
it won't reach 1.0 if nobody helps tho
mlsarecmg 4y ago
React acknowledges that nothing can ever be purely declarative, it allows you to declare a view while giving you an outlet for imperative computations and side-effects (hooks). There is no contradiction in that. In Fiber to animate is to use useFrame, which happens to be outside of React and bears no extra cost or overhead, nor does it conflict with reactive prop updates. useFrame allows any individual component to tie its mutations into the render loop. The reactivity debate is next to irrelevant in WebGL because that is a loop driven system, it is not event-driven like the DOM. If you doubt that observe Svelte/Threlte, which can update the view directly, yet relies on useFrame modeled after Fibers. That is because you need deltas (to be refresh-rate independent), flags (needsUpdate), imperative functions (updateProjectionMatrix etc), it is never just a prop update. That said, i don't know much about React-Pixi/Konva and so on, and if these do not have a loop outlet then yes i agree. But the whole premise of that article just falls flat.

unconed 4y ago

it won't reach 1.0 if nobody helps tho

mlsarecmg 4y ago

React acknowledges that nothing can ever be purely declarative, it allows you to declare a view while giving you an outlet for imperative computations and side-effects (hooks). There is no contradiction in that. In Fiber to animate is to use useFrame, which happens to be outside of React and bears no extra cost or overhead, nor does it conflict with reactive prop updates. useFrame allows any individual component to tie its mutations into the render loop. The reactivity debate is next to irrelevant in WebGL because that is a loop driven system, it is not event-driven like the DOM. If you doubt that observe Svelte/Threlte, which can update the view directly, yet relies on useFrame modeled after Fibers. That is because you need deltas (to be refresh-rate independent), flags (needsUpdate), imperative functions (updateProjectionMatrix etc), it is never just a prop update. That said, i don't know much about React-Pixi/Konva and so on, and if these do not have a loop outlet then yes i agree. But the whole premise of that article just falls flat.