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by nwah1 2621 days ago
I agree largely from a development perspective, but the client-side javascript frameworks are ultimately more performant, particularly on mobile, and are not as bad as they used to be. Neither server-side nor WASM are ideal for mobile devices. Downloading many megabytes of .NET dependencies for a WASM app is obscene compared to like 30 kilobytes for React.
3 comments

It won't be megabytes, that's only in the experimental phase. Binaries can shrink dramatically once run through a linker and trimmed down to only used APIs.

As far as performant, I agree it wont matter in most trivial interactions but large datasets with computations already see an impact (for example we have million row datatables to show sometimes).

> Binaries can shrink dramatically once run through a linker and trimmed down to only used APIs.

It's worth pointing out that .NET Core has an assembly/executable generator that can package only the .NET libraries that are actually used.

Rust-based WASM front-end libraries will likely be small and also high performance. Unfortunately, all of the existing ones are highly experimental right now.
> “30 kilobytes for React” This is just not even close to being true.
The compressed size is 31 kb, and other frameworks are smaller.

https://gist.github.com/Restuta/cda69e50a853aa64912d

There's 3kb Preact with almost identical API.
So what's the other 27KB+ for?
Fiber, support fo async rendering, suspense, hooks. A different VDOM algorithm.
Better error handling and messaging...
With 5g that won't be an issue anymore...
Until they decide that 5g is good enough to allow them to ship the browser with every website. Net speeds have been increasing every year and yet the websites take longer to load.
In 2026 maybe...