Post #2221095

2026-05-08 01:56 UTC

A point excerpted from a talk I gave earlier this week at Microsoft&#39;s internal performance symposium (alt talk title: &quot;CSS-in-JS: Frontend&#39;s Worst Idea&quot;): Browsers are virtual machines tuned to efficiently turn *markup* into *pixels*. If your system tries to generate pixels from not-markup, you&#39;ll be working against the grain of the system, and should expect to suffer massive performance penalties -- both in CPU and memory use -- as a result. For deep reasons, this is not going to change.

Replies (5)

@rysiek@mstdn.social 2026-05-08 01:57

@slightlyoff@toot.cafe thank you, I've been angry about this for years. Any chance to get the slides, or a write-up of your talk?

Open ##2246178
@ekg@social.librem.one 2026-05-08 02:04

@slightlyoff@toot.cafe a huge problem is that the clients resources are "free", their exist little incentives to budget with respect for the users hardware, battery, or experience. I think it would be neat if the industry defined a standard for resource use. Let's say 32mb and 1mops

Open ##2246181
@curious_carrot@mastodon.social 2026-05-08 02:53

@slightlyoff@toot.cafe Alex, I love you! :D Thank you for bringing these things up. I'm looking forward to the blog post.

Open ##2246182
@revin@toot.cafe 2026-05-08 05:00

@slightlyoff@toot.cafe the entire philosophy of the stack I’m building at $employer is based on the idea that the best JavaScript library available is actually written in C++ and it’s the browser runtime and it’s worth deliberately reshaping your architecture so as much as possible runs (and stays!) in that layer

Open ##2246183
@t_var_s@phpc.social 2026-05-08 09:31

@slightlyoff@toot.cafe @baldur@toot.cafe Still developers aren't completely wrong when thinking of components as bits of HTML + CSS + JS

Open ##2246185