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Comment by bluepnume | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of what I'm seeing in Glimmer so far. I had fun adding support for xcomoponent yesterday, making Glimmer components work as cross-domain components.

https://medium.com/@bluepnume/introducing-support-for-cross-...

I'd love it if it were a little more flexible to get started with though. Rather than fire up ember-cli, I'd love to just be able to:

1. Load glimmer.js from a CDN

2. Extend glimmer.Component

3. Render my component into an element

I know ember-cli solves this problem for a lot of users, but I'd love for the number of steps to get a "hello world" working to be as simple as the above. I think that's one of the reasons React has been so successful: it's stupid-simple to get started with, and it draws you in from there.

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This is simply not possible with what Glimmer tries to achieve. (Did you even read the article?)

It's not possible to have a slower development build which does template->bytecode conversion on page load?

The point I'm trying to make it, there's already a huge amount of churn around the vast amount build tooling needed to write any javascript these days. Part of making a framework with a low barrier to entry is having the build tooling stay out of your way until you're ready to deploy.

I get that's not necessarily Glimmer/Ember's philosophy, I just think it's a shame that using the framework from day 1 requires buying into all of the technology choices around ember-cli.

Minimising time to first render/interaction is on the list what is important for Glimmer. I don't see how this is compatible with moving the conversion engine to the client.

(Not to mention that the app size zealots will eat you alive)

Yeah, that's essential in production. Totally agree. I'm mainly talking about the development experience for first-time users, or for people who just want to throw Glimmer onto one of their apps on localhost and play around with glimmer.Component. The thing that needs to be fast in those scenarios is the developer experience, not the app.

If you want to play around, have a look at Ember Twiddle:

https://ember-twiddle.com/

(No Glimmer there yet, only full Ember, but you can get a feel for what it can do, how it is like, test a things out...)

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