This article concludes with the following statement:
> So much of development is trade-offs, and you have to choose according to the situation, which ultimately comes down to the developer’s experience and judgment.
It’s a great article, but I think it is a bit behind the ball in framing scheduling problems as a matter of “experience and judgment”. The problem of allocating work to a scarce resource is one of the oldest and most well-studied in all of computer science. It would make sense to go consult a textbook on the matter before trying to reinvent the wheel.
Great piece, OP. We work in WASM and are considering web workers to help with rendering documents off the main thread in that context. I was surprised to read that ArrayBuffer is moved by reference only! Might be an option. Thanks for putting this together.
One thing that I found quite interesting to see is how the behaviour of the "4.000 particles" demo changes between the 5ms rendering and the "everything now" rendering.
> So what if off-screen posts were left as empty shells that only take up their height, and got filled with real content as they approach the screen?
Yeah fuck everyone doing that, hello Reddit, Outlook for Web or Bluesky. It makes searching on such "feed" pages with the browser's search function an utter pain in the ass, made worse by the fact that the platforms' own search functions are outright braindead.
Yeah, but if your website with, you know, text and stuff, doesn't do any stupid and unnecessary crap, it doesn't matter where the nonexistent unnecessary yet expensive code doesn't run.
and if you have no website at all, it takes zero seconds to load.
But for people who are developing websites that are more than just text, this is an excellently written article and great advice.
It's funny, for mobile app dev it feels like the community are a lot of focused on staying off the main thread, this is the first time I've come across one for webdev.
Well yeah but if you do actually need things like images, animations, high frequency updates, etc, this is actually a pretty good overview of how to approach it. Also learned that react uses posting to a MessageChannel to yield!
GP is right that just like with garbage where "reduce, reuse, recycle" the first question for optimizing something should be if you need to do the calculation at all.
This is true as well, yeah, but it came off as dismissive of everything too. Personally I prefer information dense interfaces with minimal chrome, but there really is a certain joy when you get to use a well designed and optimized fancy reactive, immersive interface
Amazing how you are being so down voted, most webpages do utter crap that no one would want the webpages to be doing other then advertisers. Really most things should be text and if we lived in a more cooperative world everything would be easy to parse and manipulate text with some video and images and perhaps various well defined interface types for different services that can be implemented in various ways as to the users liking.
My point is that many websites are using way too much technology for what they need to do, with correspondingly long load times and choppy runtime begavior.
Correct. But if the page is, at least in part, an art piece rather than an information dump, or needs to do interactive rendering for its purpose (an editor like the markdown example, live updating status displays, games and other interactive toys, etc), then the tech is necessary and this article is useful.
> So much of development is trade-offs, and you have to choose according to the situation, which ultimately comes down to the developer’s experience and judgment.
It’s a great article, but I think it is a bit behind the ball in framing scheduling problems as a matter of “experience and judgment”. The problem of allocating work to a scarce resource is one of the oldest and most well-studied in all of computer science. It would make sense to go consult a textbook on the matter before trying to reinvent the wheel.
One thing that I found quite interesting to see is how the behaviour of the "4.000 particles" demo changes between the 5ms rendering and the "everything now" rendering.
Yeah fuck everyone doing that, hello Reddit, Outlook for Web or Bluesky. It makes searching on such "feed" pages with the browser's search function an utter pain in the ass, made worse by the fact that the platforms' own search functions are outright braindead.
But for people who are developing websites that are more than just text, this is an excellently written article and great advice.
It's funny, for mobile app dev it feels like the community are a lot of focused on staying off the main thread, this is the first time I've come across one for webdev.
What's your point? Are you saying all animations and rendering are unnecessary?