News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on In web design, everything easy is hard again. Parent comment

Re:In web design, everything easy is hard again by aaron-lebo on Saturday February 10, 2018 @07:31AM (#16347038)
That's incredibly high praise for Clojurescript. It's got some great features but it has flaws, too. I feel like many people new to web dev would be more confused setting up a Clojurescript project than they would be with JS. It was a lot of googling when I did it a couple weeks ago, and that's coming from someone who has done several times over the years (what's this boot thing, I was told lein was the best thing ever?).

Those are all great languages. It is important to realize that they will increase bundle sizes, which is a common rant about web pages these days. Hello world in Bucklescript/Reason, for example, is 23 KB (anything touching the std lib at least), Elm much bigger than that. My friend's 500 line Clojurescript/Reagant app was over 500 KB uncompressed, 5k lines of JS will come in at 140 KB.

It's worth being aware of the tradeoffs you are making, because often when people are selling new tech they tend to overstate advantages and understate disadvantages.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In web design, everything easy is hard again by pka on Saturday February 10, 2018 @09:18AM (#16347358)
> It is important to realize that they will increase bundle sizes

Absolutely, and it wouldn't make sense to program a tiny static webpage in e.g. Purescript.

That said, to put that into perspective, pulling 350 npm modules for a bigger project is kind of the norm now. Using compile-to-js languages will incur more overhead still and it depends on the project whether that's acceptable or not, but many times it most definitely is (also, I hope webassembly will help with bundle sizes in the future.)

I'm not really up-to-date re Clojurescript's package manager, but I know people who've specifically stated that one of the reasons for using Clojurescript is that package management and bundling is just so much easier than the standard JS npm/yarn/bower/gulp/webpack/etc amalgamation.

[ Parent | on HN ]