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Comment by trueadm | Hacker News Reader

Note: I'm the author of Inferno

I commonly hear the same thing – you've benchmarked React and it performs fine. Did you benchmark this on a modern MacBook/laptop by any chance?

The realism is that the desktop market is only 15% of the entire global online market. In developing nations, Android mobile performance is essential. React, Angular, Ember and other libraries have never performed well in this space.

If you're shipping a huge bundle for your app – you're doing something wrong too. You need to take into account that mobile users are likely to have a 3G connection at best and are likely to be on a 5+ year old device. You need to endorse code-splitting, service workers and other PWA features to better accommodate those users. Inferno will deliver the best in class mobile performance when paired with those features.

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It's probably not the same people making these comments, but it's funny to juxtapose "these web technologies are plenty fast, and size is no issue" and "I need 32GB ram + 4 real cores on my macbook for serious web dev".

If the whole system is dedicated to a single page, sure a few hundred KiB of minified javascript is absolutely fine. But neither the developer's system or the user's system is dedicated to a single page. It adds up. It tends to keep adding up until some significant percentage of people hit the limit where stuff is slower than makes sense, considering the AAA games I was playing on a laptop 13 years ago with literally less than 10% of what common laptops today have.

Anyway, kudos for caring about efficiency.

I worked on JavaScript performance at Facebook. I completely agree that we need the things that you mentioned. The problem is that no one is building them.

Instead we get demo apps and poorly thought out blog posts that compare library bundle sizes. It's a distraction that doesn't address the problem and diverts attention from the real problems with web performance.

For almost any real world application the fixed overhead of React/Inferno/Preact will be quickly dwarfed by the overhead of application code, even with code splitting. Unless you can address that cost then you shouldn't be building a client rendered mobile app.

Please, please, write more, and more details!

To much web developers have that "works on my (fastest possible) desktop or notebook" attitude, and every developer that understands and talks about what's actually going on by most of the users (those using the slower devices) is worth gold.

The interview actually talks quite a bit about how I went about making these changes. Worth fully reading!

Thanks. I've read it, what I'd like to see is more of the stuff addressed to other developers, exactly like in your response above.

You understand the issues because you personally compared, measured, whereas most of the developers just consider something as "working" if they personally "don't wait" too much for the stuff they are producing. That's why I wanted to motivate you to consider talking about your experiences that more developers can directly use.

I love your work with Inferno, congratulations.

Is there any place that the community usually hangs out like a chat room or a forum ?

We have a Slack if you're interested: https://inferno-slack.herokuapp.com/

What are example real world websites using Inferno?

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