I feel the same way about tools like ESLint and Prettier as well after discovering Oxc https://oxc.rs/

With Kotlin/Spring Boot, compilation is annoyingly slow. That's what you get with modern languages and rich syntax. Apparently the Rust compiler isn't a speed daemon either. But tests are something that's under your control. Unit tests should be done in seconds/milliseconds. Integration tests are where you can make huge gains if you are a bit smart.

Most integration tests are not thread safe and make assumptions about running against an empty database. Which if you think about it, is exactly how no user except your first user will ever use your system.

The fix for this is 1) allow no cleanup between tests 2) randomize data so there are no test collisions between tests and 3) use multiple threads/processes to run your tests to 1 database that is provisioned before the tests and deleted after all tests.

I have a fast mac book pro that runs our hundreds of spring integration tests (proper end to end API tests with redis, db, elasticsearch and no fakes/stubs) in under 40 seconds. It kind of doubles as a robustness and performance test. It's fast enough that I have codex just trigger that on principle after every change it makes.

There's a bit more to it of course (e.g. polling rather than sleeping for assertions, using timeouts on things that are eventually happening, etc.). But once you have set this up once, you'll never want to deal with sequentially running integration tests again. Having to run those over and over again just sucks the joy out of life.

And with agentic coding tools having fast feedback loops is more critical than ever.

Luckily, we have invented a completely new nightmare in the form of trying to graft machine-usable interfaces on top of AI models that were specifically designed to be used by humans.

It just shows that people don’t value the actual performance of what they’re running.

Compare this to essentially any modern business app, the product being sold has very little relationship with CPU cycles, or the CPU cycles are SO cheap relative to what you're getting paid, no one cares to optimize.

Yea, cypress has this in their anti-patterns:

https://docs.cypress.io/app/core-concepts/best-practices#Usi...

Dangling state is useful for debugging when the test fails, you don't want to clean that up.

This has been super useful practice in my experience. I really like to be able to run tests regardless of my application state. It's faster and over time it helps you hit and fixup various issues that you only encounter after you fill the database with enough data.

This is because the kotlin compiler is not written in the way people write fast compilers. It has almost no backend to speak of (if you are targeting the jvm), and yet it can be slower at compilation than gcc and clang when optimizing.

Modern fast compilers follow a sort of emerging pattern where AST nodes are identified by integers, and stored in a standard traversal order in a flat array. This makes extremely efficient use of cache when performing repeated operations on the AST. The Carbon, Zig, and Jai compiler frontends are all written this way. The kotlin compiler is written in a more object oriented and functional style that involves a lot more pointer chasing and far less data-dense structures.

Then, if run on a non-graal environment, you also have to pay for the interpreter and JIT warmup, which for short-lived tasks represents nontrivial overhead.

But unlike header inclusion or templates, which are language level features that have major effects on compilation time, I don't think kotlin the language is inherently slow to compile.

[1] https://rolldown.rs/

I like Vite as a tool, but knowing that the Vite folks actually care about helping others learn and contribute is awesome.

I used to maintain a build workflow library [1] a lifetime ago; while our frontend build needs have evolved way beyond it, I can't avoid the feeling that we overengineered a little too much.

[1] https://github.com/ricardobeat/cake-flour

Node.js has been extraordinarily useful for building build tools. We're outgrowing it's capacity and rightfully moving to a compiled language. Also faster tooling is essential for establishing a high quality feedback loop for AI agents

It all slowly adds up where you think a simple $10 VPS with 2 gigs of ram is enough but it's not, especially if you want a team of 10-30ish to work sporadically within the same box.

There can be a lot of major wins by rewriting these programs in more efficient languages like Go or Rust. It would make self hosting more maintainable and break away from the consulting class that often has worse solutions at way higher prices (for an example, one consulting group sells software similar to postiz but for $2k/month).

For a server built in the cloud those cycles could actually be taken up by other things, freeing the system and bringing costs down.

For a client computer running electron, as long as the user doesn't have so many electro apps open that their computer slows down noticeably, that inefficency might not matter that much.

Another aspect is that the devices get cheaper and faster so today's slow electron app might run fine on a system that is a few years away, and that capacity was never going to be taken up by anything else on the end user's device.

at least 100x slower than it needs to be?

For anyone that doesn't know: With sqlite you can serialize the db to a buffer and create a "new" db from that buffer with just `new Datebase()`. Just run the migrations once on test initialization, serialize that migrated db and reuse it instantly for each test for amazing test isolation.

Not meant as a gotcha but I'm surprised because people always tout it as being so much faster than Next. (4m with Turbo would have to be a crazy huge app IME)

Next started with Turbopack alpha as a Webpack alternative in Next 13 (October 2022) and finally marked Turbopack as stable and default in Next 16 (October 2025). They also ran sketchy benchmarks against Vite back in 2022 [0].

Next's caching has a terrible history [1], it is demonstrably slow [2] (HN discussion [3]), RSCs had glaring security holes [4], the app router continues to confuse and relied on preview tech for years, and hosting Next outside of Vercel requires a special adapter [5].

Choosing Next.js is a liability.

0 - https://github.com/yyx990803/vite-vs-next-turbo-hmr/discussi...

1 - https://nextjs.org/blog/our-journey-with-caching

2 - https://martijnhols.nl/blog/how-much-traffic-can-a-pre-rende...

3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43277148

4 - https://nextjs.org/blog/CVE-2025-66478

5 - https://opennext.js.org/

See Sitecore Cloud, Sanity, Contentful,....

(haven't tried it myself)

I'm a big believer in fully reviewing all LLM generated code, but if I had to generate and review a webpack config like this, my eyes would gloss over...

The big news regarding Void Cloud is that it all seems to be built on Cloudflare workers. The landing page is very light on info atm too. [0]

I am super excited that they are MIT open sourcing Vite+ however. In that realm, they are obviously targeting Bun as their main competition. Unfortunately for Bun, if they are forced to help Anthropic more than they can focus on OSS, they might lose their current (perceived?) advantage.

0: https://void.cloud/

For that matter, TypeScript's version of decorators ("experimental decorators") also works: https://playground.oxc.rs/?options=%7B%22run%22%3A%7B%22lint...

What's not supported is the current draft proposal for standardized ECMAScript decorators; if you uncheck experimentalDecorators, the decorator syntax is simply passed through as-is, even when lowering to ES2015.

- Every Electron app ships with its own copy of Chromium (for rendering the UI) and Node.js (for system APIs). So even simple apps start with a fairly large memory footprint. It also means that electron essentially ships 2 instances of v8 engine (JIT-compiler used in Chromium and NodeJS), which just goes to show how bloated it is.

- Electron renders the UI using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That means the app needs a DOM tree, CSS layout engine, and the browser rendering pipeline. Native frameworks use OS widgets, which are usually lighter and use less memory.

- Lastly the problem is the modern web dev ecosystem itself; it is not just Electron that prioritises developer experience over everything else. UI frameworks like React or Vue use things like a Virtual DOM to track UI changes. This helps developers build complex UIs faster, but it adds extra memory and runtime overhead compared to simpler approaches. And obviously don't get me started on npm and node_modules.

All it has to do is put price pressure on your salary. (And it is already doing that.)

That's no less a build step than concating, bundling, minifying, etc. When people say "I'm against processing code before deploying it to a web site" but then also say "TypeScript is okay though" or "JSX is okay though," all they're really saying is "I like some build steps but not others." Which is fine! Just say that!

Fast all the way down, especially when coupled with REPL tooling.

Why do you expect to be able to replace a 2k/month solution with a $10/month VPS?

This method is actually super popular in the PHP world, but people get themselves into trouble if they tidy up all the footguns that stock sqlite leaves behind for you (strict types being a big one).

Also, when you get a certain size of database, certain operations can become hideously slow (and that can change depending on the engine as well) but if you're running a totally different database for your test suite, it's one more thing that is different.

I do recognize that these are niche problems for healthy companies that can afford to solve them, so ymmv.

Was it? Have you forgotten namespaces and enums?

You're not actually suggesting that technology can't evolve are you? Especially one whose original design goals were to process basic forms and are now being used to build full-blown apps?

It's absolutely wild to me that with everything that has happened in the last 2 decades with regard to the web there are still people who refuse to accept that it's changed. We are building far bigger and more complex applications with JavaScript. What would you propose instead?

These days, TypeScript will only add new features if they are either JavaScript features that have reached consensus (stage 3 iirc), or exist at the type system only.

There have been attempts to add type hints directly to JavaScript, so that you really could run something like TypeScript in the browser directly (with the types being automatically stripped out), but this causes a lot of additional parsing complexity and so nothing's really come of it yet. There's also the question of how useful it would even be in the end, given you can get much the same effect by using TypeScript's JSDoc-based annotations instead of `.ts` files, if you really need to be able to run your source code directly.

JSX is a nice server side templating language. There a lot of people who aren't dependency conscious, and a lot of people who love react, and there is quite a bit of overlap in those two groups. I've used bun + preact_render_to_string for server side JSX templates before and it was nice. When I did it seemed that bun somewhat embraced react, and I could imagine react being the path of least resistance to server-side JSX there for some of the folks in the aforementioned groups.

Imagine a page that loads html during the first load, and then performs client-side routing during subsequent navigations. Is it an SPA? Is it not an SPA?

And to sell Vercel on top.

10 years ago this sentence probably would have start a flame war. ;-)

5 or so years ago, Next was a pretty solid option to quickly build up a non SPA, when combined with the static export function. It wasn't ideal, but it worked and came batteries included. Over time it's become more bloated, more complicated, and focused on features that benefit from Vercel's hosting – and static builds can't take advantage of them.

These newer features seem of limited benefit, to me, for even SPAs. Why is there still not a first class way of referencing API routes in the client code that provides typing? Once you reach even medium scale, it becomes a mess of inteprolated string paths and manually added shared response types.

Fetch index.html -> Fetch JS bundle -> Evaluate -> Fetch /users/me

You do:

Fetch index.html (your page is rendered at this point) -> rehydrate with client side JS for interactivity in the background

It's a pretty smart solution I think, and many people are still sleeping on the whole SSR topic.

I checked sitecore cloud to have special integration for nextjs and reactjs. But it also support vanilla js as well.

Are there really anyone who is exclusive to nextjs?

The LLM generated vite config is 20 lines

> Unfortunately for Bun, if they are forced to help Anthropic more than they can focus on OSS

Curious: is that speculation, or based on observation?

[0]: https://voidzero.dev/about

https://github.com/oxc-project/oxc/issues/6073

Do you know what the status is on using Rolldown as a crate for rust usage? At the moment most rust projects use SWC but afaik its bundler is depreciated. I usually just call into Deno for builds but would be nice to have it all purely in Rust.

https://esbuild.github.io/plugins/#svelte-plugin

esbuild's plugin support is limited which is why vite had to use rollup for prod build.

Once you've created a zfs snapshot, everything else is basically instant and costs very little perf.

It was originally about build steps but now you're talking about it's design.

And your only response is to use a technology years away from being practical for most web apps?

This is also the length on our CI which is running on some POS build machine. Locally it's far faster, but with Vite 8 its crazy fast.

I recently migrated to Tanstack for this and confirm it's been strictly better so far, especially having dynamic paths in my use-case (makes a hybrid app much more realistic)

In the age of cheap custom software solutions everyone should at least try to make something themselves that's fit for purpose. It doesn't take much to be a dangerous professional these days, and certainly more than ever before can a dangerous professional be truly dangerous.

He's saying that the software seems free, but is so inefficient that it bloats other costs to run it. And he never said he wanted to replace $2K/month with $10/month.

It's just garbage software, I brought it up as an example IDK why. Commentators here like knowing snippets about other industries in the profession, I know I do at least.

But to answer your Q, yes I do expect a cron job schedule, analytics, and a CRM not to require 8 gig of ram in order to not barf on itself too hard.

These things are incredibly resource intensive for their actual jobs. The software is incredibly wasteful.

A $5/vps should be enough to host every suite of software a small business needs. To think otherwise is extremely out of touch. We're talking about 3 concurrent users max here, software should not be buckling under such a light load.

Though it’s hard to imagine what the web would look like if the language had become the standard. JS is a pain but AS was even less suitable for general purpose compute.

It's grown into a product of cults and attempted zingers rather than pragmatic or sensible technical discussions about what we should and shouldn't expect to be able to do with an individual programming language.

edit: to clarify, I assume there needs to be a basical level of comprehension of programming languages to debate the nuance of one, and if you can't think of a single reason as to why someone would want types removed, that's a possible indicator you don't have that necessary level yet, and I think the most effective way for you to learn that is to Google it. Sorry for coming across as rude if you genuinely don't know this stuff.

If you already know many reasons as to why types would be removed, then it seems disingenuous to ask that question, other than to make the point that you feel types shouldn't be stripped. If you think that, say it, and explain why you think they shouldn't be stripped.

Also, writing JavaScript for the backend is needlessly underperforming for anything with any load.

2 gigs of ram should be considered overkill to cover every single business case for a variety of tools (analytics, mailer/newsletter, CRM, socials, e-commerce).

But in browser, for now only the more limited JSDoc-style types can be shipped as-is indeed.

Software can be drastically way less resource intensive, there is no excuse outside of wanting to exacerbate the climate crises.

This period of our history in the profession will be seen as a tremendous waste of resources and effort.

Where is this weird expectation coming from?

Why should that be the case?

ActionScript3 was a very suitable language.

See OCaml or Haskell, they also have interpreters and REPLs as part of their tooling.

Also there should be no need to always compile crates from scratch when starting a new project.

Which ironically circles back to your remark of having a similar problem.

These things aren't complicated, but when you choose NodeJS/Javascript they become way more complicated than expected. I say this as someone who has ever worked professionally with JS and nothing else for a 15 year long career.

Writing software that can only be used by the affluent is not the direction I want our industry to go in.

Node dependencies are fine, add an npmrc file to have it default to exact versioning and you solve 90% of common day to day problems. It's not ideal, but nor is cargo's mystery meat approach to importing optional features from packages.

Go write the software yourself, no one owes you anything.

Maybe if you had to actually write it yourself, you'd quickly figure out why people prefer "inefficient" languages for these things.

A cron job scheduler does not in fact require 500 MB of memory. You're just being disingenous, that software is doing a lot more than just that.

Maybe leave JavaScript on the browser, where it belongs.

People prefer JS because all they know is JS, it's that simple. Please tell me why you think devs choose JS, I'm legitimately curious but your attitude of constant dismissal and disparagement makes it seem you just want to beat people down and not engage.