Re:Go 1.11 Beta 2 is Released
by untog on Friday July 20, 2018 @09:03AM
(#17574602)
But that's the minimum, i.e. a Hello World. A Go framework that actually has the same level of functionality would surely be much larger. And besides, JS libraries of that size are a bad thing - JS developers have spent a long time working on things like code splitting to get page load times as low as possible. It'll be a huge shame if we throw all that out with WebAssembly.
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I mean, this is a limitation of Go. With JS, the "runtime" is in your browser, you've got a beautiful JS engine already. With Go, it would need that runtime bundled. Similar to shipping the JVM with your JAR.
This isn't a limitation we'd see with something like Rust.
> Similar to shipping the JVM with your JAR.
The size of the Java Runtime Environment is around 80 MB (compressed). Even with Jigsaw and just the "java.base" module its still 13 MB (compressed).
You'd add size when you include whatever DOM abstraction you wind up going with, but at the same time you wouldn't need to add much else because the Go stdlib is pretty complete. On the other hand JS developers are adding Lodash and other utility things that Go already comes with.
Well these days people are using tree-shaking and ES6 imports to only include the lodash functions they actually need.
My point isn't that Go should be banned from WASM or something, but that "5x increase in library size for zero functionality sounds fine" is a disappointing view to see given how hard the JS community has worked on bundle sizes.