Why I’m skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in “faster” languages

I love the js-framework-benchmark. It’s a true open-source success story – a common benchmark, with contributions from various JavaScript framework authors, widely cited, and used to push the entire JavaScript ecosystem forward. It’s a rare marvel. That said, the benchmark is so good that it’s sometimes taken as the One True Measure of a web […]

Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a good opportunity to reach across “the great divide” and try to find common ground rather than another opportunity to dunk on each other. Ryan Carniato started the […]

Recently I got an interesting performance bug on emoji-picker-element: I’m on a fedi instance with 19k custom emojis […] and when I open the emoji picker […], the page freezes for like a full second at least and overall performance stutters for a while after that. If you’re not familiar with Mastodon or the Fediverse, […]

Pop quiz: what emoji do you see below? [1] Depending on your browser and operating system, you might see: The flag of Martinique The old flag of Martinique (which kinda looks like the Quebecois flag) The enigmatic initials “MQ” This, frankly, is a mess. And it’s emblematic of how half-heartedly browsers and operating systems have […]

Writing good benchmarks is hard. Even if you grasp the basics of performance timings and measurements, it’s easy to fool yourself: You weren’t measuring what you thought you were measuring. You got the answer you wanted, so you stopped looking. You didn’t clean state between tests, so you were just measuring the cache. You didn’t […]