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Comment by andersmurphy | Hacker News Reader

For those of you who don't think Datastar is good enough for realtime/collaborative/multiplayer and/or think you need any of the PRO features.

These three demos each run on a 5$ VPS and don't use any of the PRO features. They have all survived the front page of HN. Datastar is a fantastic piece of engineering.

- https://checkboxes.andersmurphy.com/

- https://cells.andersmurphy.com/

- https://example.andersmurphy.com/ (game of life multiplayer)

On both the checkboxes/cells examples there's adaptive view rendering so you can zoom out a fair bit. There's also back pressure on the virtual scroll.

View on HN

> They have all survived the front page of HN

Right but this says “bring your own backend” in big letters on the splash page. So surviving HN isn’t really something Datastar is doing here.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make.

He shared examples of some immensely dynamic apps that are running on a potato and survived HN, showing that this simplifies things greatly and can scale. Hypermedia-first is a very viable, and simplified, approach.

I think my point is pretty straightforward. Datastar is a front end framework. If any frontend framework can’t survive HN traffic it’s doing something wrong in a truly unholy way.

Surviving, or not surviving, a traffic influx is a backend restriction.

And yet, most frontend frameworks barely on even the simplest of sites. This is not only well documented, but most of them have now moved towards some sort of SSR hybrid - at great complexity cost.

I disagree with “most”. 99% of the sites featured on HN do just fine.

OP is a talented developer that wrote a backend capable of surviving a ton of traffic. Other developers on the internet have written backends that cannot sustain a ton of traffic.

The choice of frontend framework is separate from both. You can write a performant web app that uses React. I’m sure you can write one that falls over immediately with Datastar.

Thank you for the kind words.

I think for me the key thing is Datastar lets me keep most of my state on the backend, which makes the backend much simpler to write. It also lets me do immediate mode streaming of the HTML, which again is non trivial in something like react without a lot of added complexity.

So it's an enabler in that sense. But, yes it's totally possible to write a backend that falls over with datastar like any technology.

I also agree, that Datastar does benefit from backend experience and if you don't have that experience it can to some extent feel like:

"Draw some circles. Now draw the rest of the Owl".

That's a fair point.

But I think that the real point that /u/andersmurphy was trying to convey was that hypermedia is VERY performant because immensely talented C++ engineers have optimized precisely this, for decades. The notion that "frontend" devs have that the DOM can and must be managed via JS is simply ridiculous, and is one of the primary things that datastar and hypermedia approaches in general are trying to combat.

In fact, he openly states elsewhere how the sites' backends are actually done in a deliberately dumb, unperformant way, where the backend streams the ENTIRE DOM with each sse message, which gets morphed into the DOM. He could have done something more granular, like streaming only the checkboxes that have changed, but it wasn't at all necessary because the dumb way worked well.

Moreover, the SSE streams benefit from immense compression ratios because somehow the compression window overlaps across messages. Something like 95+%, IIRC.

> The notion that "frontend" devs have that the DOM can and must be managed via JS is simply ridiculous

The idea that UI state should be managed locally is ridiculous now?

Its interesting, and telling, that that's the only part of my comment that you replied to...

Anyway, browsers are built specifically to render HTML. And html/hypermedia is specifically meant to manage and transfer state. The web has lost its way. If you want to read more about this, this free book is a great start: https://hypermedia.systems/book/contents/

Or the essays at HTMX https://htmx.org/essays/

Good luck to you

I don’t feel the rest was really worth engaging with. SSE is a really interesting technology but again, it’s frontend agnostic. You can build a great SSE solution with any other framework.

I read about approaches like this and I still don’t see the reason to do them, beyond “because you can” and “JavaScript is bad”. The separation of data and display logic between server and client is a sensible separation of concerns. It’s the way any non-web solution does it and I don’t really see what would make the web so special that a different approach is worth it.

The entire point of frameworks is so that you dont have to engage with lower level things... D* makes it exceptionally easy to work with SSE and all sorts of web APIs.

that's fine that you dont see any reason to use the web as it was designed to be used. But I dont see any reason for me to engage any further with you.

You do it to reduce complexity.

The problem with JS heavy frontend is you now have TWO applications. The real application, on the backend, which makes all the decisions, and the frontend application.

You have TWO states which are being mutated independently that you now have to sync.

reducing complexity is important but is hardly the fundamental reason to choose between server side or client side rendering or state management. that just depends on the nature of the problem and the context it has to be solved in. sometimes it doesn't matter, then you have a choice.

you guys are furiously arguing (and not really listening) about this or that hammer being good enough to treat every problem as a nail, like ssr was the "holy hammer". well, it isn't and not every problem is a nail, and while datastar looks excellent to me i simply would have no use for it if i needed client side logic or state for whatever reason.

Why? What's stopping you putting some state on the client with datastar. Just because it's discouraged doesn't mean you can't.

It has a whole client side signal system.

interesting! i wasn't aware of that, thanks for pointing it out.

to be clear, my point was that where the state has to be managed is more often than not an architectural decision given by the requirements, and the choice of tools should be a consequence of that, not a precondition.

I agree, but the kicker is that most websites can be server side rendered trivially. Most web "apps" are not applications. They are forms and pages.

The client side logic is, usually, just to make the developers happy because developers love complexity.

Obviously there are many exceptions. But not every application is exceptional. We all hate to admit we're working on simple or trivial things but... We are. Often.

>This is not only well documented

Please, I'm begging you to share this "well documented" fact that most frontend frameworks barely "handle" on the simplest of sites.

Certainly! Here's a good start (React is the main focus, but it extends to many other frameworks)

https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/ (there's MUCH more at this site as well)

https://www.zachleat.com/web/react-criticism/

The HN comments for that first one gave us the worst "advice" that this site has ever seen and might ever see [1]:

> Nothing that is visible "below the fold" should ever run or load until the page is scrolled down by the site visitor.

The commenter septupled down and eventually blamed trolls :D

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285326

Sorry, I'm not understanding what relevance some HN comments have to do with the link I shared...?

Though, for the record, I agree with everything that person - and other sibling commenter - wrote. It is quite obvious the people were not reading and replying in good faith.

Okay! That is a wild thing to admit!

So well documented is......2 sites? lol

It's a frontend framework and a backend SDK in multiple languages, for SSE and more.

Data star is a backend agnostic backend framework that happens to have a 10kb on the frontend. You should probably read the guy before coming to conclusions on what it is

Sure. You're not wrong. I'd argue Datastar's fat morph model is what lets me write a much simpler backend that's amenable to batching/better compression. It's also fast enough on the client that this immediate mode style rendering of HTML is actually possible.

I'm also not doing anything fancy on the backend, I'm using a dynamic language not known for it's speed (Clojure). Really, most of the work here is being done by SQLITE, batching, and brotli compression, which you can all use from any language.

I will concede that languages with access to real threads (GO, JAVA, C# etc) do better out of the box for this kind of CQRS architecture.

[flagged]

It's global multiplayer, you can see everyone changes simultaneously. There's no client side state for the checkboxes they are all on the server.

The whole point of this framework is that a ton of the logic remains on the backend, with live connections to the frontend. At least for me the performance and hosting cost implications of that was the first question that came to my mind when I looked at this, I don’t understand how answering this question isn’t relevant here.

Can you please not post like this here? It's against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're right. Sorry, can't delete the comment now.

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