3 ms·

I think a big problem is the fact that many web frameworks allow you to write these kind of complex apps that just "work" but performance is often not included

• taminka 7mo ago
  it's unironically just react lmao, virtually every popular react app has an insane number of accidental rerenders triggered by virtually everything, causing it to lag a lot
  • r_lee 7mo ago
    well that's any framework with vdom, the GC of web frameworks, so I'd imagine it's also a problem with vue etc.. I don't understand though why performance (I.e. using it properly) is not a consideration with these companies that are valued above $100 billion like, do these poor pitiful big tech companies only have the resources to do so when they hit the 2 trillion mark or something?
    • vscode-rest 7mo ago
      Nobody gets promoted for improving web app performance.
      • r_lee 7mo ago
        yep. I think this is the root problem, not the frameworks themselves
        • cess11 7mo ago
          If it's slow people also stick around for longer if they have something they must accomplish before leaving.
      • achenet 7mo ago
        From: https://hpbn.co/primer-on-latency-and-bandwidth/#speed-is-a-feature https://hpbn.co/primer-on-latency-and-bandwidth/#speed-is-a-... > Faster sites lead to better user engagement. > Faster sites lead to better user retention. > Faster sites lead to higher conversions. If it's true that nobody is getting promoted for improving web app performance, that seems like an opportunity. Build an org that rewards web app performance gains, and (in theory) enjoy more users and more money.
      • gspetr 7mo ago
        Yes, they do. OGs remember that Facebook circa 2012 had navigation take like 5-10 seconds. Ben Horowitz recalled asking Zuck what his engineer onboarding process was when the latter complained to him about how it took them very long to make changes to code. He basically didn't have any.
    • array_key_first 7mo ago
      It's not a problem with vue or svelte because they are, ironically, reactive. React greedily rerenders. It's also not a problem with the react compiler.
    • yurishimo 7mo ago
      Vue uses signals for reactivity now and has for years. Alien signals was discovered by a Vue contributor. Vue 3.6 (now in alpha/beta?) will ship a version that is essentially a Vue flavored Svelte with extreme fine grained reactivity based on a custom compiler step. One of the reasons Vue has such a loyal community is because the framework continues to improve performance without forcing you to adopt new syntax every 18 months because the framework authors got bored.
    • threetonesun 7mo ago
      They have no real competitors, so anything that makes the user even stickier and more likely to spend money (LinkedIn Premium or whatever LinkedIn sells to businesses) takes priority over any improvements.
    • vaylian 7mo ago
      > well that's any framework with vdom Is it time for vanilla.js to shine again with Element.setHTML()? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/setHTML https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/set... It's a bit unfortunate that several calls to .setHTML() can't be batched so that several .setHTML() calls get executed together to minimize page redraws.
    • mike_hearn 7mo ago
      The React paradigm is just error prone. It's not necessarily about how much you spend. Well paid engineers can still make mistakes that cause unnecesssary re-renders. If you look at older desktop GUI frameworks designed in a performance-oriented era, none of them use the React paradigm, they use property binding. A good example of getting this right is JavaFX which lets you build up functional pipelines that map data to UI but in a way that ensures only what's genuinely changed gets recomputed. Dependencies between properties are tracked explicitly. It's very hard to put the UI into a loop.
      • tracker1 7mo ago
        Property binding and proxies really didn't work well in JS at all until relatively recently, and even then there is actually a much worse history of state management bugs in apps that do utilize those patterns. I've yet to actively use any Angular 1.x app or even most modern Angular apps that don't have bugs as a result of improper state changes. While more difficult, I think the unidirectional workflows of Redux/Flux patterns when well-managed tend to function much better in that regard, but then you do suffer from potential for redraws... this isn't the core of the DOM overhead though... that usually comes down to a lot of deeply nested node structures combined with complex CSS and more than modest use of oversized images.
    • tracker1 7mo ago
      Well, their lowest tier devs, they have started firing and churn a lot... combined with mass layoffs... and on the higher end, they're more interested in devs that memorized all the leet code challenges over experienced devs/engineers that have a history of delivering solid, well performing applications. Narcissism rises to the top, excess "enterprise" bloat seeps in at every level combined with too many sub-projects that are disconnected in ways that are hard to "own" as a whole combined with perverse incentives to add features over improving the user experience.
  • rustystump 7mo ago
    I think linkedin is built with emberjs not react last i checked… The problem with performance in wep apps is often not the omg too much render. But is actually processing and memory use. Chromium loves to eat as much ram as possible and the state management world of web apps loves immutability. What happens when you create new state anytime something changes and v8 then needs to recompile an optimized structure for that state coupled with thrashing the gc? You already know. I hate the immutable trend in wep apps. I get it but the performance is dogshite. Most web apps i have worked on spend about 10% of their cpu time…garbage collecting and the rest doing complicated deep state comparisons every time you hover on a button. Rant over.
• machomaster 7mo ago
  The Grok android app is terrible in that sense. Just writing a question with a normal speed will make half of the characters not appear due to whatever unoptimized shit the app does after each keystroke.
  • throwuxiytayq 7mo ago
    Sounds quite overengineered. CEOs have basically no idea what they're doing these days. If this were my company, I'd start by cutting 80% of staff and 80% of the code bloat.
    • userbinator 7mo ago
      Don't know if this is satire, but I do wonder if Musk uses the Grok app himself.
      • upmind 7mo ago
        As someone who knows xAI employees, he does use it a LOT and reports bugs very often afaik
        • gspetr 7mo ago
          The "very often" part is wild to me. You'd think being an engineer himself[0] he'd fix the root cause: the testing process, not work as an IC QA himself. [0] He holds the title of Chief Engineer at SpaceX.
          • selkin 7mo ago
            Holding the title of engineer does not make one a good or capable engineer.
        • saagarjha 7mo ago
          Does he use Android?