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Comment by cntainer

3 years ago

Honestly github always felt snappy and intuitive to me, more so than many "cool" react fronts I've seen.

It would be great if they wrote an article about this switch to understand some of the challenges they were facing.

I would also be curious if they considered other approaches and stacks.

25 comments

cntainer

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ronnier  3 years ago

I don't have any data to back this up, just my opinion, but I prefer backend rendered sites with Javascript augmentation for the parts that need it. Just feels faster.

These JavaScript UIs feel clunky and slow IMO. Maybe it's the (sometimes) dozens of calls the UI make back to the server to get data whereas if it was all rendered in the backend the round trip time would be a lot faster since the server is closer to the data, but my browser needs to make a call across the internet to the server and then to the database or whatever.

Also for tools websites at companies I work at, as a backend dev, building those tools in react is huge overhead. Webpack and react and redux etc. It's a lot to deal with for some simple tool. I'm wondering how much internal tool websites built in react slow down the development process at corps.

  • throw_m239339  3 years ago

    > These JavaScript UIs feel clunky and slow IMO

    They don't feel slow, they are slow, even more so on mobile, but developers have stopped caring about mobile web performance a long time ago. So much for "flash is killing my battery", now it's Javascript.

  • 323  3 years ago

    In theory React websites should transfer less data since you just send a JSON model instead of one annotated in full HTML markup. The React runtime would be cached after the first visit.

    • martinald  3 years ago

      The problem isn't the amount of data but the number of round trips required to get it.

      Imagine you need to do the following calls to get the page rendered with the various information different parts of the page has:

      1. Get user information

      2. Get projects for user

      3. Get the selected project

      Now, if this was all server side rendered, it might take 1ms to go to the database and get the various bits of info, or 3ms for 3 sequential requests.

      With a react app and say 250ms of latency to the database, you're looking at 750ms of overhead - 200x slower.

      Of course you can architect all your APIs to always return everything the user needs so they don't have to do multiple requests, but that has its own drawbacks and honestly is very difficult to do and plan ahead for, especially at scale with multiple consumers of various APIs.

      6 replies →

    • coffeefirst  3 years ago

      That’s the theory, but every time I measure it the combined data and JS needed to render it wind up being more than plain HTML both in bytes transferred and milliseconds to render.

      There will be exceptions of course, but I haven’t found them.

paxys  3 years ago

Snappy and intuitive while loading static pages of text, sure, but their code browsing and search experience needs massive improvement. I'd love to not have to clone a repo and pull up an IDE just to be able to understand the code.

  • thegginthesky  3 years ago

    Trur, when I need to browse code I just use codespaces, which you can access by using github.dev/owner/repo, or pressing dot ( . ) when inside the repo

  • diarrhea  3 years ago

    It’s not impossible to imagine Web IDEs surpassing desktop ones, but it’s not happening anytime soon. Until then desktop IDEs will remain superior, so this experience won’t change anytime soon. For every new feature a web IDE adds, we’ll end up missing desktop features still.

noahtallen  3 years ago

I actually disagree — GitHub has been relatively slow for me when it comes to page transitions. For example, switching between a PR’s various tabs would probably be a lot faster with client rendering.

Of course, performance will come down to how well the team builds the site and optimizes it. It is very easy to make a site slow in so many different ways. You always have to be looking at and optimizing it for improvements, both on the client and server. React isn’t immune to this, just as various server frameworks aren’t immune to it either.

  • hardwaregeek  3 years ago

    Agreed. I'm rather surprised at people in this thread saying they prefer GitHub's server rendered setup. I use GitHub a lot in my job and it feels rather slow/clunky.

    • Aeolun  3 years ago

      All the people that were used to Bitbucket’s 20s page loads think Github is heaven.

  • cntainer  3 years ago

    I'm curious what relatively slow means for you.

    As an example I just made a quick test from my Firefox mobile browser in desktop mode and the switch between PR tabs is not instant but close enough to not be bothered by it.