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Comment by nevir | Hacker News Reader

> And exactly what language do these fine folks do their frontend development in, Go, C++?

For a very long time, GWT (Java compiled to JS) was the preferred approach. Then development moved to the Closure compiler (JS following very Java-like patterns), and only very recently is ES6 style code taking off.

Much of the code you see still carries the legacy of GWT/Closure (and there is so much there that porting would be an insane task). It's a slow process. But, for example, YouTube is switching over to Polymer (https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/05/a-sneak-peek-at-youtu...).

> Google sure spends a lot of resources on this lesser language for how few engineers want to work with it.

Google is a massive company, with many different (often conflicting) initiatives. Chrome spends a lot of effort on JavaScript; but Chrome engineers are (for the most part) not the ones that are writing Google's frontend code.

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> For a very long time, GWT (Java compiled to JS) was the preferred approach.

fine, but this is entirely irrelevant. the problem is that no one was optimizing for the deliverable (HTML, JS, CSS). the GWT folks could have easily written an excellent compiler so it didnt spew a bunch of unoptimized and bloated trash.

> YouTube is switching over to Polymer

which requires a massive slow polyfill in all but latest Chrome and results in a shit experience for all others (if i recall a related thread correctly [1]).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/68vehl/youtubes...

> fine but this is entirely irrelevant. the problem is that no one was optimizing for the deliverable (JavaScript). the GWT folks could have easily written an excellent compiler so it didnt generate a bunch of slow trash.

Compilers can only optimize so much. GWT/Closure do a very good job of it, too. https://www.peterbe.com/plog/advanced-closure-compiler-vs-ug...

Much of the "slow trash" is already optimized to death - it just dies under the weight of insane complexity (e.g. features), browser support, and overly-generic (IMO) support libraries

> which requires a massive slow polyfill in all but latest Chrome and results in a shit experience for all others (if i recall a related thread correctly).

Tangential: I'm not sure which version of Polymer they're using - but 1.0+ removes the need for most of the polyfilling.

> Compilers can only optimize so much. GWT/Closure do a very good job of it, too.

Closure certainly does; I use it every day. If Gmail is an example of how GWT optimizes things, then I'm afraid you're factually wrong.

> Tangential: I'm not sure which version of Polymer they're using - but 1.0+ removes the need for most of the polyfilling.

that thread is just 2 months old (i linked to it above)

It's a long time ago but from what I remember of the one GWT project I did ( a pretty big one though ), there wasn't any match to window.onload event, this made various optimizations difficult to do in GWT.

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