4 ms·

Why? Has anyone ever worked on a product where this would be even remotely feasible?

by bborud 3y ago

hningonworktime 3y ago
...So that you can make PWAs using Go? There are multiple "Built with" examples on the page - but why does everything have to be a product at the end of the day?
FireInsight 3y ago
I find that most these sorts of projects are for people just toying around or who have an irrational hatred of the JS ecosystem... Ultimately they lock devs into a tight, less supported ecosystem, and they might end up writing some parts in the languages native to the web anyways. And I mean, the page doesn't even load for me on my browser, just stuck at 0%. What kind of documentation page even needs a progressbar, just use a static page, right? Edit: for what it's worth, I gave this a second chance with raw Chromium. Loaded up to 400%, heh, but tbf the page does have product examples for seemingly useful products.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Loads just fine in my browser. I wonder what's causing this to fail for so many people. If I hold down F5, I do see the progress bar rise to 484%, but it loads in a flash for me. Maybe it's a bandwidth issue? The 4.5MB WASM file could've overwhelmed the website when it got slashdotted by the (many bots crawling the) HN front page. These projects make a lot of sense, I think. You only write one system, not a separate frontend and backend, and let the middleware sort everything out. The code rendering the plain HTML is the same code that re-renders the entire page when you switch to another page, without necessarily re-fetching data from the backend. This is terrible for websites (ironically, like this website, which documents the framework), but great for web applications. Most native browser navigation is pretty jarring unless you add a bunch of javascript to hide navigation taking place, but if that frontend expands, you're pretty quickly building two systems (a frontend and a backend) to solve one problem.
- jackson1442 3y ago
  The progress bar is (presumably) for PWA installation, it really shouldn't be showing beyond the first load (yet it is, lol). Ideally it should just do the install in the background while you use the site normally, too. It's a shame the offline functionality of the doc site just _isn't very good_ even though documentation is one of the easiest types of application to serve offline. The page _does load_ offline, but several pages are showing markdown render errors (may just be unvisited pages), images are generally missing and showing alt-text instead, etc. I'd say offline access is the killer feature of PWA as documentation, but it's just not executed well enough here.
reactordev 3y ago
As someone who has contributed to Electron alternatives, I welcome it. Electron.js is so large, binary size wise, that we should be picking the right web-app stack for the job. Webview for example, to allow one to write web-apps in C++ with bindings for other languages. Personally, go’s ability to serve content from its own binary using the `embed` package is one of the most killer features. I can ship a single binary and have my entire client packed inside. All at 28mb.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  I rather contribute to pure Web applications. Most people doing Electron probably never went through the XUL and MSHTML hype cycles. Electron will eventually join them.
  - reactordev 3y ago
    Find me another way to build cross platform applications with a consistent look and feel that isn’t Qt/C++. Electron sucks but it’s filling a gap left by the desktop api teams. As said, there’s others instead of electron. The post here is about building wasm pages as a PWA. So it’s something you could use for pure web applications (in go).
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      You mean the knowledge gap of laziness. By the way, Electron also requires C++. That is how VSCode is actually usable.
    - cdelsolar 3y ago
      Wails
- FireInsight 3y ago
  This isn't an electron alternative, though, right? There's atleast https://wails.io/ https://wails.io/ for Go, and https://tauri.app/ https://tauri.app/ for rust ofc.
candiodari 3y ago
I shipped a huge product with GWT. Backend and frontend in Java. It's still running (unlike many Java GUIs I made). I don't see why this wouldn't work.

Why? Has anyone ever worked on a product where this would be even remotely feasible?

by bborud 3y ago

Why? Has anyone ever worked on a product where this would be even remotely feasible?

...So that you can make PWAs using Go? There are multiple "Built with" examples on the page - but why does everything have to be a product at the end of the day?

FireInsight 3y ago

I find that most these sorts of projects are for people just toying around or who have an irrational hatred of the JS ecosystem... Ultimately they lock devs into a tight, less supported ecosystem, and they might end up writing some parts in the languages native to the web anyways. And I mean, the page doesn't even load for me on my browser, just stuck at 0%. What kind of documentation page even needs a progressbar, just use a static page, right? Edit: for what it's worth, I gave this a second chance with raw Chromium. Loaded up to 400%, heh, but tbf the page does have product examples for seemingly useful products.

jeroenhd 3y ago
Loads just fine in my browser. I wonder what's causing this to fail for so many people. If I hold down F5, I do see the progress bar rise to 484%, but it loads in a flash for me. Maybe it's a bandwidth issue? The 4.5MB WASM file could've overwhelmed the website when it got slashdotted by the (many bots crawling the) HN front page. These projects make a lot of sense, I think. You only write one system, not a separate frontend and backend, and let the middleware sort everything out. The code rendering the plain HTML is the same code that re-renders the entire page when you switch to another page, without necessarily re-fetching data from the backend. This is terrible for websites (ironically, like this website, which documents the framework), but great for web applications. Most native browser navigation is pretty jarring unless you add a bunch of javascript to hide navigation taking place, but if that frontend expands, you're pretty quickly building two systems (a frontend and a backend) to solve one problem.
jackson1442 3y ago
The progress bar is (presumably) for PWA installation, it really shouldn't be showing beyond the first load (yet it is, lol). Ideally it should just do the install in the background while you use the site normally, too. It's a shame the offline functionality of the doc site just _isn't very good_ even though documentation is one of the easiest types of application to serve offline. The page _does load_ offline, but several pages are showing markdown render errors (may just be unvisited pages), images are generally missing and showing alt-text instead, etc. I'd say offline access is the killer feature of PWA as documentation, but it's just not executed well enough here.

reactordev 3y ago

As someone who has contributed to Electron alternatives, I welcome it. Electron.js is so large, binary size wise, that we should be picking the right web-app stack for the job. Webview for example, to allow one to write web-apps in C++ with bindings for other languages. Personally, go’s ability to serve content from its own binary using the `embed` package is one of the most killer features. I can ship a single binary and have my entire client packed inside. All at 28mb.

pjmlp 3y ago
I rather contribute to pure Web applications. Most people doing Electron probably never went through the XUL and MSHTML hype cycles. Electron will eventually join them.
- reactordev 3y ago
  Find me another way to build cross platform applications with a consistent look and feel that isn’t Qt/C++. Electron sucks but it’s filling a gap left by the desktop api teams. As said, there’s others instead of electron. The post here is about building wasm pages as a PWA. So it’s something you could use for pure web applications (in go).
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    You mean the knowledge gap of laziness. By the way, Electron also requires C++. That is how VSCode is actually usable.
  - cdelsolar 3y ago
    Wails
FireInsight 3y ago
This isn't an electron alternative, though, right? There's atleast https://wails.io/ https://wails.io/ for Go, and https://tauri.app/ https://tauri.app/ for rust ofc.

candiodari 3y ago

I shipped a huge product with GWT. Backend and frontend in Java. It's still running (unlike many Java GUIs I made). I don't see why this wouldn't work.