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by tedunangst 3471 days ago
So, uh, what does it do? I mean, I can't even tell if it's a server or client side change.
2 comments

The research paper[1] describes Polaris. Basically, you have to make large, sweeping changes to your html, server side. Instead of your original page + js references, you serve a bunch of javascript that then dynamically recreates your page on the client side in the most performant way that it can:

• The scheduler itself is just inline JavaScript code.

• The Scout dependency graph for the page is represented as a JavaScript variable inside the scheduler.

• DNS prefetch hints indicate to the browser that the scheduler will be contacting certain hostnames in the near future.

• Finally, the stub contains the page’s original HTML, which is broken into chunks as determined by Scout’s fine-grained dependency resolution

[1]http://web.mit.edu/ravinet/www/polaris_nsdi16.pdf

That sounds like a fun idea for a precompiler.
It's in between. It's a way for website developers to explain the dependencies for the files (in html or JavaScript or whatever) and a change needed for browsers to know how to use this new data to make better requests to the server.