What is the average size of JavaScript code downloaded per website? Fuck around and find out!
  •  Oliver Lowe   ( @otl@apubtest2.srcbeat.com ) 
    11•3 months ago

    As someone who never did much web development, I was… surprised… at the amount of tooling that existed to paper over this issue. The headaches which stood out for me were JavaScript bundling (then you need to choose which tool to use - WebPack but then that’s slow so then you switch to esbuild) and minified code (but that’s hard to debug so now you need source maps to re-reverse the situation).

    Of course the same kind of work needs to be done when developing programs in other languages. But something about developing in JS felt so noisy. Imagine if to compile Java or Rust you needed to first choose and configure your own compiler, each presenting their own websites with fancy logos adorning persuasive marketing copy.

    •  jjjalljs   ( @jjjalljs@ttrpg.network ) 
      7•3 months ago

      My hypothesis is the JavaScript ecosystem is like 50:5:1 of junior : intermediate: expert contributors.

      That’s why there’s so much “fuck it, I’ll make a new project from scratch!” and “screw conventions I’m making a breaking change”. Those are frankly very junior attitudes, and they feel more common in JavaScript land.

      I don’t have any data to back this, but it’s my guess.

      That or the ecosystem is just so polluted with bad ideas, people aren’t learning good practices.

    •  lolcatnip   ( @lolcatnip@reddthat.com ) English
      5•3 months ago

      I switched jobs from one using a mostly C++ stack to one using a Typescript/JavaScript stack for a large application. I was absolutely shocked at how slow and generally shitty the tooling for JavaScript is, and coming from C++ land the bar was already very low.

  •  SuperSpruce   ( @SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip ) 
    5•3 months ago

    I read this article a few weeks ago and it sent me on a rabbit hole of web performance articles.

    I think a good budget for basic websites (articles, landing pages, and small to medium functionality web apps) is what I call the “GZ250”, or 250KB of gzipped JavaScript, which is more than plenty. I picked this amount such that yesterday’s budget phones will be able to load the website in a few seconds at 1Mbps (and the name references my motorcycle).

    For comparison, my full on games take way less than that. The Unscaled Incremental and Elemental Incremental are 52KB and 19KB of compressed JS respectively, and v1.0 of my new deckbuilding game is about 27KB. The unreleased V1.1 is massive but will still be around 50-60KB of compressed JS.

    I don’t understand how an article uses 60x the script as my games, but cutting back to 6x would be a win for accessibility and efficiency.

    •  Oliver Lowe   ( @otl@apubtest2.srcbeat.com ) 
      0•3 months ago

      Did you see this article by Dan Luu? https://danluu.com/slow-device/

      Super interesting. It’s a discussion from a point of view I hadn’t considered before: how bandwidth has increased much more than CPU performance of web apps. I felt this in a way as my main computer until recently was a mini PC with the an Intel i5-5250U processor. Despite my Internet connection going from a 10mbps link to a 300mbps link, and pings dropping from 25ms to <5ms, browsing the web on the device became unbearable.

      •  SuperSpruce   ( @SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip ) 
        1•3 months ago

        Interesting, it kinda feels like the opposite is true for me, at least on mobile. In 4 years, I’ve gone from a 1.4GHz A53 SD425 to a 2.2GHz A78 SD695 SoC, a 6x increase in single thread performance in 4 years for me. I also during that time got a powerful laptop with a Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU.

        Meanwhile, it’s still not unusual to see my Internet speeds drop below 1Mbps, often hovering around 100Kbps-300Kbps, on data or crappy university WiFi, which sometimes has a ping of no joke, 20000+ on my laptop when running Ubuntu. I can sometimes reach high throughput of up to 100Mbps, but when I don’t, my Internet speeds often chug.

      •  samc   ( @samc@feddit.uk ) English
        3•3 months ago

        Isn’t production JavaScript usually minified/obfuscated to make it hard to read?

        Also wasm is actually bytecode, which I believe has a 1:1 conversion into a text-based format called wat.

        I agree with your main point though, it’s kinda creepy when you realise just how much we are expected to allow other people’s code to run on our machines.

        •  ReversalHatchery   ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English
          1•3 months ago

          Isn’t production JavaScript usually minified/obfuscated to make it hard to read?

          Somewhat, but often it’s still readable. Or maybe I just don’t look at it often enough to notice the worse cases…

          Also wasm is actually bytecode, which I believe has a 1:1 conversion into a text-based format called wat.

          That’s good to be aware of, thanks!

    •  SuperSpruce   ( @SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip ) 
      1•3 months ago

      I still have no idea what WASM really is. I’ve tried looking at articles but it still confuses me. I know how to use HTML, CSS, JS, and actual ARM assembly language at a basic level, but I don’t see how any of this could be used with WASM.

      •  onlinepersona   ( @onlinepersona@programming.dev ) English
        3•3 months ago

        WASM is just like assembly. It has instructions similar to MOV, JMP, STA, etc. It can be distributed as the textual instructions or as the compiled binary format.

        When it started it was interpreted by JS or could be compiled to JS directly. It proved to be faster than hand-written JS. However, it still had to go through a JS interpreter. Now, there’s a WASM interpreter / virtual machine built into browsers. It’s very much the new java bytecode but without running an unsandboxed, external (outside of the browser) java virtual machine.
        Given it’s an intepreter / virtual machine, it of course has limited APIs in the browser. For a while, it was not possible to access the DOM from WASM, so JS would do the DOM stuff and WASM was called (just like calling an external function in a lib in C/C++/Rust/…) upon to do computationally complex stuff since it was faster than running it in JS through the JS interpreter. IINM, WASM now does have access to the DOM.

        Of course there are WASM interpreters outside of browsers that can be included as libraries in other languages. Rust devs are using it for example for plugin systems in their software.

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