[jasonkillian]

Happened to see this thread on HN, (and disclaimer I'm an engineer at Hex) very cool project jwithington!

Wanted to take a second to address your comment about performance, lqet. All your points are absolutely fair - I personally apologize for some of those layers of divs and some of that JS as they're definitely my fault!

For context, Hex lets you write Python and SQL code in a notebook-esque format and then create apps from that to share across the web. So there's actually quite a breadth of functionality we need to support under the hood that adds to frontend complexity. We also revamped our whole app-building experience recently, so there's a couple straggling bugs (like the text selection one you mentioned, whoops!).

But I totally agree with you - thinking about all that JS makes me wince a little haha as we definitely care and want to improve frontend performance. We plan to make better use of code-splitting and lazy-loading of JS so that the frontend code for more complex apps is only pulled in if/when necessary. (We also want to work on building better tooling to make analysis of code-splitting effectiveness easier - we've found that a lot of existing webpack bundle analyzer tools don't provide enough visibility for our use cases. Maybe an open source project for us one day!) And we want to decrease over-the-wire data size and reduce necessary network calls so you can get a faster initial load. We're a small team, so can't make promises when exactly this will all happen, but hopefully with these changes and other improvements things will feel a bit snappier someday soon