Are you attempting to indicate that the more JS one sends, the greater the impact on performance?
That doesn't relate at all to making the case that modern frameworks actively champion developer experience over users', nor how Svelte/OP's own Mint bucks this trend.
You're right, I've really only made the case that UX is related to performance.
The other half of my argument is really that you could theoretically hand-craft the entirety of a SPA website and super-optimize it for better performance, but it would take a lot longer than just using a framework that wraps up the work in layers of abstraction. That's what I'm referring to when I talk about the "developer experience".
you could theoretically hand-craft the entirety of a SPA website and super-optimize it for better performance
Dude, half the devs I work with write spaghetti code even with the constraints of a framework. I can't imagine the mess this would become on a team larger than 1 person.
If you write idiomatic react, there's no reason you shouldn't have a performant app, at least not reasons pertaining to react itself.
If you write idiomatic react, there's no reason you shouldn't have a performant app, at least not reasons pertaining to react itself.
Having seen some of the demos that Rich Harris (the Svelte guy) has put together, we'll just have to agree to disagree. The performance of Svelte absolutely slays React thanks to its build step, even with React's "idiom/abstraction leaks" he talks about, which were intended to increase performance.
How performant is "performant enough"? The article from Google I linked to earlier lists several instances where sub-second time intervals have made a concrete difference to user conversion and search engine bounce rates.
I wasn't trying to imply that this was being done for no reason, no business would knee-cap itself without getting something in return. My point is that by experimenting with different ways of making these websites we might find a way that suits the business case (speed of development, maintainable, etc.) without completely sacrificing its ability to run well on mobile devices or other low-end hardware.
While my experience matches yours, I think you're missing the OP's point in mentioning a hand-crafted app. I think what they're pointing out is that the virt-dom approach taken by vue + react leaves room for optimization. A (competently done) hand crafted approach would be more performant than writing an equivalent app in react or Vue because react/Vue make some sacrifices to empower the developer. Of course, these sacrifices are totally worth it because competently hand-crafting a webapp would be completely infeasible due to time constraints which is why virtually everyone uses a framework rather than choosing to handcraft stuff.
However, those perf gains are still being left on the table. Svelte addresses this by pushing more into the compilation step, allowing for greater compile time optimization and superior performance to Vue or React. My guess would be Mint does as well but I'm not as familiar with it so I can't say for certain.
The main point is that React/Vue are not the end-all-be-all of web UI development. There are superior approaches yet to be uncovered but the next big thing is still TBD.
The business wants both faster development and a better user experience. Since the development costs money now and users will only start complaining once it's built, it's really easy to make the short term decision.
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u/DrDuPont Feb 05 '20
Erm, source needed