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Datastar author here... AMA, but know that Datastar is pure yak shaving for me to do real work stuff so I have no golden calves, just approaches I've seen work

Datastar author here... AMA, but know that Datastar is pure yak shaving for me to do real work stuff so I have no golden calves, just approaches I've seen work at scale.

theboywho 1y ago
What do you think about the Hotwire stack (Stimulus, Turbo) as compared to Datastar ?
- andersmurphy 1y ago
  So I've used Turbo 8 to make a multiplayer app using a non rails backend. It was a struggle, the docs are incomplete. I mostly pieced things together from what others have done and written about. Which, is ironic considering your point about having a massive community behind it. The nice thing about Turbo 8 is morph (it uses idiomorph like datastar). It's also got a pretty simple refresh model. However, you quickly realise the limitation. You can even see this in the Turbo 8 demo (see this issue https://github.com/basecamp/turbo-8-morphing-demo/issues/9 https://github.com/basecamp/turbo-8-morphing-demo/issues/9). You can try to fix this with `data-turbo-permanent` but you'll now run into another issue that you can't clear that field without resorting to JavaScript. Which, brings me to the next thing, I found I was still writing quite a bit of JavaScript with turbo. Like HTMX pushes you to use alpin.js/hypercript turbo pushes you to use Stimulus.js. Turbo.js is not push based it's mostly polling based. Even when you push a refresh event, it pushes the client to re-fetch the data. Sure this is elegant in in that you re-use your regular handlers but it's a performance nightmare as you stampede your own server. It also prohibits you from doing render sharing between clients (which is what opens up some of the really cool stuff you can do with datastar). I was using turbo.js with SSE so no complaints there. But, most turbo implementations use websockets (which if you have any experience with websockets is just a bad time: messages can be dropped, no auto reconnect, not regular http, proxy and firewalls can block it etc). Finally, according to the docs Turbo Native doesn't let you use stream events (which is what gives you access to refresh and other multiplayer features). I like turbo, I'd use it over react if I was using Rails. I use it for my static blog to make the navigation feel snappy (turbo drive). It gives you a lot without you having to do anything. But, the minute you start working on day 2 problems and you are not using rails the shine fades pretty quickly. There are 3 ways to do things, frames, streams and morph. None of them are enough to stop you having to import stimulus or alpine and honestly it's just a bit of a mess. If you need help with turbo the best blogs posts are from (Radan Skoric https://radanskoric.com/archives/ https://radanskoric.com/archives/). Specifically these: https://radanskoric.com/articles/turbo-morphing-deep-dive-idiomorph https://radanskoric.com/articles/turbo-morphing-deep-dive-id... https://radanskoric.com/articles/turbo-morphing-deep-dive https://radanskoric.com/articles/turbo-morphing-deep-dive I think he's also got a book on turbo he's releasing soon (if you go with turbo it's probably worth getting). Those posts helped me grok Torbo 8 morph and ultimately what sold me on datastar. Morph, signals and SSE is all you need. As for mobile I'll just wrap it in a webview (as an X native mobile dev I can tell you it will lead to a lower maintenance app than native or react native). TLDR: datastar solves all the problems I ran into with turbo and more. It's faster, smaller, simpler, more examples, better docs and easier.
  - Bo0 1y ago
    Regarding Turbo being push based and the approach of using refresh event to reload page. Would pushing Turbo Stream fragments using a SSE connection overcome the issues mentioned? Is this the same as the Datastar approach?
- sudodevnull 1y ago
  Not a fan (andersmurphy actually is better at explaining than me). However! I've been working with Micah from the Turbo.js team on idiomorph ideas. We are already multiples of v0.7.3 right now and getting faster each day. Together we can solve the core ideas even if we disagree on the top level API.
vb-8448 1y ago
Doesn't it make stateful the whole stack?
buangakun 1y ago
Hello, I've heard of Datastar before but didn't really pay attention to it since all the air in the room was sucked up by HTMX. I tried HTMX and I found that it is really, really hard to manage complexity once the codebase gets big. Is there an example of Datastar being used with Go in a highly interactive application that goes beyond just a TODO app so I could see how the project structure should be organized?
- sudodevnull 1y ago
  the site is just a Go app, https://github.com/starfederation/datastar/tree/develop/site https://github.com/starfederation/datastar/tree/develop/site
  - buangakun 1y ago
    Amazing! Thank you.
  - whalesalad 1y ago
    oh my
postepowanieadm 1y ago
So how are your server bills? Does Datastar supports caching/prerendering?
- andersmurphy 1y ago
  So being on the front page of hacker news twice in 24 hours. The multiplayer game of life game is running on a 15.59$/month 4 core AMD 8GB ram shared VPS (hetzner) and only at about 30% load. That's with a Clojure backend running very naive code.
  - mattgreenrocks 1y ago
    I believe it. Part of the issue I suspect is that generation JS truly does not understand how fast the old school GC’d runtimes (e.g. JVM/CLR) are at this point.
    - api 1y ago
      It reminds me of the articles you see from time to time about how someone successfully moved millions of rows of data in the cloud for less than a hundred dollars or some such absurdity. It'd be hilarious if it weren't so deeply discouraging and tragic. You might have heard of Eroom's Law, which is Moore's Law backwards. It states that software bloat will soak up all gains from Moore's Law. Well, with cloud we now have a whole industry with an economic incentive to put Eroom's Law into practice, since cloud makes more money the more inefficient things can become. So to do what a simple local app could do in a minute must now be done across five different services with microservice backends, etc.
    - andersmurphy 1y ago
      It's not just the performance, it's that there is a lot less ecosystem churn. I can run Clojure/Java code I wrote 10 years ago and it will still work.

Datastar author here... AMA, but know that Datastar is pure yak shaving for me to do real work stuff so I have no golden calves, just approaches I've seen work at scale.

theboywho 1y ago

What do you think about the Hotwire stack (Stimulus, Turbo) as compared to Datastar ?

andersmurphy 1y ago
So I've used Turbo 8 to make a multiplayer app using a non rails backend. It was a struggle, the docs are incomplete. I mostly pieced things together from what others have done and written about. Which, is ironic considering your point about having a massive community behind it. The nice thing about Turbo 8 is morph (it uses idiomorph like datastar). It's also got a pretty simple refresh model. However, you quickly realise the limitation. You can even see this in the Turbo 8 demo (see this issue https://github.com/basecamp/turbo-8-morphing-demo/issues/9 https://github.com/basecamp/turbo-8-morphing-demo/issues/9). You can try to fix this with `data-turbo-permanent` but you'll now run into another issue that you can't clear that field without resorting to JavaScript. Which, brings me to the next thing, I found I was still writing quite a bit of JavaScript with turbo. Like HTMX pushes you to use alpin.js/hypercript turbo pushes you to use Stimulus.js. Turbo.js is not push based it's mostly polling based. Even when you push a refresh event, it pushes the client to re-fetch the data. Sure this is elegant in in that you re-use your regular handlers but it's a performance nightmare as you stampede your own server. It also prohibits you from doing render sharing between clients (which is what opens up some of the really cool stuff you can do with datastar). I was using turbo.js with SSE so no complaints there. But, most turbo implementations use websockets (which if you have any experience with websockets is just a bad time: messages can be dropped, no auto reconnect, not regular http, proxy and firewalls can block it etc). Finally, according to the docs Turbo Native doesn't let you use stream events (which is what gives you access to refresh and other multiplayer features). I like turbo, I'd use it over react if I was using Rails. I use it for my static blog to make the navigation feel snappy (turbo drive). It gives you a lot without you having to do anything. But, the minute you start working on day 2 problems and you are not using rails the shine fades pretty quickly. There are 3 ways to do things, frames, streams and morph. None of them are enough to stop you having to import stimulus or alpine and honestly it's just a bit of a mess. If you need help with turbo the best blogs posts are from (Radan Skoric https://radanskoric.com/archives/ https://radanskoric.com/archives/). Specifically these: https://radanskoric.com/articles/turbo-morphing-deep-dive-idiomorph https://radanskoric.com/articles/turbo-morphing-deep-dive-id... https://radanskoric.com/articles/turbo-morphing-deep-dive https://radanskoric.com/articles/turbo-morphing-deep-dive I think he's also got a book on turbo he's releasing soon (if you go with turbo it's probably worth getting). Those posts helped me grok Torbo 8 morph and ultimately what sold me on datastar. Morph, signals and SSE is all you need. As for mobile I'll just wrap it in a webview (as an X native mobile dev I can tell you it will lead to a lower maintenance app than native or react native). TLDR: datastar solves all the problems I ran into with turbo and more. It's faster, smaller, simpler, more examples, better docs and easier.
- Bo0 1y ago
  Regarding Turbo being push based and the approach of using refresh event to reload page. Would pushing Turbo Stream fragments using a SSE connection overcome the issues mentioned? Is this the same as the Datastar approach?
sudodevnull 1y ago
Not a fan (andersmurphy actually is better at explaining than me). However! I've been working with Micah from the Turbo.js team on idiomorph ideas. We are already multiples of v0.7.3 right now and getting faster each day. Together we can solve the core ideas even if we disagree on the top level API.

vb-8448 1y ago

Doesn't it make stateful the whole stack?

buangakun 1y ago

Hello, I've heard of Datastar before but didn't really pay attention to it since all the air in the room was sucked up by HTMX. I tried HTMX and I found that it is really, really hard to manage complexity once the codebase gets big. Is there an example of Datastar being used with Go in a highly interactive application that goes beyond just a TODO app so I could see how the project structure should be organized?

sudodevnull 1y ago
the site is just a Go app, https://github.com/starfederation/datastar/tree/develop/site https://github.com/starfederation/datastar/tree/develop/site
- buangakun 1y ago
  Amazing! Thank you.
- whalesalad 1y ago
  oh my

postepowanieadm 1y ago

So how are your server bills? Does Datastar supports caching/prerendering?

andersmurphy 1y ago
So being on the front page of hacker news twice in 24 hours. The multiplayer game of life game is running on a 15.59$/month 4 core AMD 8GB ram shared VPS (hetzner) and only at about 30% load. That's with a Clojure backend running very naive code.
- mattgreenrocks 1y ago
  I believe it. Part of the issue I suspect is that generation JS truly does not understand how fast the old school GC’d runtimes (e.g. JVM/CLR) are at this point.
  - api 1y ago
    It reminds me of the articles you see from time to time about how someone successfully moved millions of rows of data in the cloud for less than a hundred dollars or some such absurdity. It'd be hilarious if it weren't so deeply discouraging and tragic. You might have heard of Eroom's Law, which is Moore's Law backwards. It states that software bloat will soak up all gains from Moore's Law. Well, with cloud we now have a whole industry with an economic incentive to put Eroom's Law into practice, since cloud makes more money the more inefficient things can become. So to do what a simple local app could do in a minute must now be done across five different services with microservice backends, etc.
  - andersmurphy 1y ago
    It's not just the performance, it's that there is a lot less ecosystem churn. I can run Clojure/Java code I wrote 10 years ago and it will still work.