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>We had some very good reasons to do it: a team of strong Go engineers; a complex UI that TypeScript/React didn't scale well for;

After going though demo a bit, I can see this is what they wanted to say here: we have a team of strong Go engineers who are not that strong when it comes to web frontend, the smells of it are everywhere. The signup page don't fit in the screen and have empty scrollable space around it. Every click inside the dashboard is a spinner on the whole screen with waiting for page reload. Even icons are showing their alt-texts while loading. These are all smells of just low-experience web application, but it's relieving to say React didn't scale






Web developers without mobile experience have been using React Native to create smelly mobile apps for a long time now, and it's still growing

Mobile experience is two distinct Java/ObjC worlds, so creating smelly apps on web technologies is justified by that.

> a complex UI that TypeScript/React didn't scale well for

You can go a long way with render optimizing on the web. Even some basic virtualization should allow for showing millions of log entries. Or, you could still use web technologies (OffscreenCanvas), a bit weird to go directly with WebAssembly.


Exactly, it's hard to imagine a UI so complex it would "not scale" in the browser.

Not looking like they are making Concorde cockpit or something.


I mean, the browser itself was made to display complex UI elements, and is optimized for displaying interactive dashboards (at least it tried to in the last 20 years).

Plus, computers are fast enough, if something is somehow still slow, you can still make it seem fast if you add proper transitions and fix the timing of animations and loading order. For example, maybe one log file is 10GB, of course the browser will crash if you try to load all of it in the browser. Simply preload the latest 1000 lines, then use websockets to load new data as the user scrolls. Now, if you scroll first and then load the data, the app will seem slow, the trick is to start loading the data when the scroll already reached 90% of current buffer. Anyway, tricks like this will make any app seem instant, even if things still actually take time to load.


I sometimes remember what mad tricks game developers did in the late 90s and early 00s to optimize their games and all that "web doesn't scale" crap sounds just funny to me ;)

I can hear these Gophers in the meeting complaining how TypeScript is „completely unreadable”.



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