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Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

> I think this should be more nuanced: the DOM itself has been fast for 10-15 years

It's faster than it was 10-15 years ago. It's still extremely slow.

> things like layout are still a concern on large pages.

> it easy to miss when you’re requesting the browser do other work like recalculating layout

You can't say things like "DOM is fast" and "oh, it's fast if you exclude literally everything that people want to be fast".

> and also that as people started using heavier frameworks they started losing track of what triggers updates.

I don't know if you realise, but on the very same devices where you're complaining about "large pages and oh my god layout" people are routinely rendering millions of objects with complex logic and animations in under 5 milliseconds?

The DOM is excruciatingly slow.

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I think you’re using DOM to refer to the entire browser, not just what’s standardized as the DOM. Things like creating or modifying elements will run at tens of millions per second on an old iPhone _but_ there are operations like the one you mentioned which force the browser to do other work like style calculation and layout, and if you inadvertently write code which is something like “DOM update, force recalc, DOM update” in a loop it’s very easy to mistakenly think that the DOM is the source of the performance problem rather than things like the standard web layout process having many ways for different elements to interact.

And, yes, I’m not unaware that different display models have different performance characteristics. Modern browsers can run into into the millions of objects range but fundamentally a web page is doing more work and there’s no way it’s going to match something which does less. This is why there have been various ways to turn off some of the expensive work (e.g. fixed table layout) and when APIs like canvas, WebGL, and WebGPU use different designs to allow people who need more control to avoid taking on costs their apps don’t need.

> I think you’re using DOM to refer to the entire browser, not just what’s standardized as the DOM.

No, I'm referring to DOM as Document Object Model.

> Things like creating or modifying elements will run at tens of millions per second on an old iPhone

Not in the DOM :)

> but fundamentally a web page is doing more work and there’s no way it’s going to match something which does less.

That's why I'm saying that the DOM is not fast. It's excruciatingly slow even for the most basic of things. It's, after all, designed to display a small static page with one or two images, and no amount of haphazard hacks that accumulated on top of it over the years will change it. It will, actually, make it much worse :)

There is a reason why the same device that can render a million of objects doing complex animations and logic in under 5ms cannot guarantee smooth animations in DOM. This is a good example: https://twitter.com/fabiospampinato/status/17495008973007301... (note: these are not complex animations and logic :) )

> No, I'm referring to DOM as Document Object Model.

This is what I was talking about: you’re talking about the DOM but describing things like layout and rendering. Yes, nobody is saying that abstractions which do less won’t be faster - that’s why things like WebGL exist! – but most of the performance issues are due to things which aren’t supported in WebGL.

If you aren’t using something slow like React you could do on the order of hundreds of thousands element creations or updates per second in the mid-2010s – checking my logs, I was seeing 600k table rows added per second on Firefox in 2015 on a 2013 iMac (updates were much faster since they didn’t have as much memory allocation), and browsers and hardware have both improved since then.

To be clear, that’s never going to catch up with WebGL for the kinds of simple things you’re focused on - displaying a rectangle which doesn’t affect its peers other than transparency is a really tuned fast path with hardware acceleration – but that’s like complaining that a semi truck isn’t as fast as a Tesla. The web is centered on documents and text layout, so the better question is which one is fast enough for the kind of work you’re doing. If you need to move rectangles around, use WebGL - that’s why it exists! - but also recognize that you’re comparing unlike tools and being surprised that they’re different.

> This is what I was talking about: you’re talking about the DOM but describing things like layout and rendering.

Ah yes, because layout and rendering are absolutely divorced from DOM and have nothing to do with it :)

> that’s never going to catch up with WebGL for the kinds of simple things you’re focused on - displaying a rectangle which doesn’t affect its peers other than transparency is a really tuned fast path with hardware acceleration

You will never catch up with anything. It's amazing how people keep missing the point on purpose even if they eventually almost literally repeat what I write word for word, and find no issues with that.

Here are your words: "The web is centered on documents and text layout". Yes, yes it is. And it's barely usable for that. But then we've added lots of haphazard hacks on top of it. The rest I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39485437

Rendering a bunch of vertices in 3D is an “embarrassingly parallel” problem, you can scale it pretty much forever.

With all due respect, if you compare that to 2D layouting and stuff, you don’t know much about the topic.

Why are you sure, he was talking about vertices or 3D in general?

I was. But people are always missing a point.

There's a range of options between "can render millions of objects with complex animation and logic" in a few milliseconds and "we will warn you when you have 800 dom nodes on a static page, you shouldn't do many updates or any useful animations"

Somehow people assume that what HTML does is so insanely hard that the problem of 2D layout should not just be relevant to modern day supercomputers, but to be so slow as to be seen with the naked eye.

The 2D layout in HTML is slow because the DOM (with the millions of conflicting hacks on top of it) is slow, not the other way around.

We could do most of the frankly laughable HTML layouts at least in early 2000s, perhaps earlier.

Well, definitely earlier, as Xerox that influenced the Mac is from 1970s

"The 2D layout in HTML is slow because the DOM (with the millions of conflicting hacks on top of it) is slow, not the other way around."

Well yeah, all those hacks of html that we cannot get rid of, because of backwards compatibility are probably the main reason the DOM is slow. HTML was made to view documents after all and not design UI's. And now it is, what it is. But there are options now!

So yes, it is definitely possible to build snappy 2D layouts. I build one with HTML, using only a subset and that worked out somewhat allright .. but now I am switching to WebGL. And there is a world in between in terms of performance.

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