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Comment by defenestration | Hacker News Reader

It's like Scratch on steroids. I'm making games together with my son in Scratch. Will give this a try when he's ready to try something more complex. Btw. the performance of the app is great for a web-app. What were your main challenges to get this performance?

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We run events for total beginner programmers and have actually found Construct to be much easier for beginners than Scratch.

Scratch requires a lot more up-front knowledge to make a simple game, e.g. students need to learn control flow, event loops, etc.

Construct, being event-based (and especially with the built-in behaviors) lets us get beginners started in about 40 minutes, while still being complex enough that they understand variables, instances, properties, etc within a few hours.

Thanks, and I'm happy you'll consider it to use with your son. Performance wise, I'll let Ash talk more about that as he's the one who's been obsessively making sure it loads and runs as good as possible.

Layout performance is the biggest problem probably - when things change the browser too often does a full layout of the document. We use tons of CSS containment but there are still bugs where Chrome does far more layout than necessary, e.g.: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=667370

Virtual DOM is completely unnecessary to us. We have minimal problems with DOM calls. It is all to do with layout performance, and VDOM makes no difference at all there.

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