Issue #19: Cigaro

🎶 My cock is much bigger than yours… 🎶

Today we talk about multiple developer boys and toys, their never-ending arms race, and the role of marketing messages in a project’s place in the ecosystem which shouldn’t be too prone to following these messages religiously. This trend isn’t always bad, adversarial, toxic, or negative in any way. It just recognizably annoys the pleasure of tool usage out of the developer experience sometimes, as a side effect of the overall innovation excitement. It’s understandable, as many teams are trying to get up to speed with the AI race and bring as much novelty and curiosity to stay in the first cars of the hype train. The eyes in this regard are mostly staring at Remix and Redwood, of course, but also at some groundbreaking technologies like the Vite ecosystem. And we’re starting with the latter as (arguably) the most anticipated and (undoubtedly) useful.

The Good

Void(0) (that is, basically, the cool guys behind Vite, Vue, Vitest, and a lot more) has announced Rolldown-Vite, as a Rust-based (= damn fast!) drop-in (you can just use rolldown-vite npm package directly instead of vite in your codebase) replacement for Vite. You shouldn’t notice any functional change by using it instead of the habitual ubiquitous tool, but the resulting build time and memory consumption should change drastically in some cases (3-16 times faster builds, and 100 times lower memory load).

With rolldown-vite, esbuild is no longer required. Instead, all internal transformations and minification are handled by Oxc, leading to improved performance using a single foundational layer.

Rolldown-Vite in its current form is aimed at early adopters, but there are plans to switch all consumers to it eventually, and to get to using it for a full-bundle mode for dev purposes. It’s really exciting to see how the best developments in programming languages are bringing so much value to the JavaScript ecosystem. And hopefully, your enterprise monorepo won’t be the vale of sorrows anymore one day.

[…] We plan to “rustify” more of Vite’s internals to reduce communication overhead and unlock even greater performance gains.

The Bad

The Redwood team proceeds with their philosophical rebellion-like crusade (the impression is fortified if you watch season 2 of “Andor” in the background, as I do) in an obscure but enticing direction with their new clickbaity article called “Your React Meta-Framework Feels Broken, Here’s Why”.

Real DX doesn’t require a glossary. It doesn’t hide execution. It doesn’t make your editor lie to you.

While the research is quite interesting and sane, the approach of diminishing the roles and approaches of other metaframework teams and tools is a bit cringe.

They fight the web. They abstract the platform. They demand trust instead of understanding.

It’s not the first time developers are saying “you should just use JavaScript and the platform,” but this time it sounds somewhat funny with all the inevitable tradeoffs Redwood guys need to keep in mind anyway.

Just TypeScript […] A router that returns JSX […] Middleware […] Server components […]

I honestly like the lore and the message of the new Redwood, but to be fully frank, I don’t feel any real “purity” or “revolution” in that, and (as in season 2 of “Andor” which I already mentioned but can’t help to re-surface, I beg your pardon!) unfortunately, to make development with metaframeworks really productive (especially in big gangs teams), one needs to get their hands dirty with the sworn abstractions and complexities.

By the way, the authors of one of the tools Peter Pistorius from Redwood mentions — the glorious Remix metaframework (which almost got vanished by its React Router alter ego) — decided to eventually summon the kraken wake the tool up.

This isn’t just a new version — it’s a new direction. One that’s faster, simpler, and closer to the web itself.

Doesn’t it remind you of something? 🤔

Interestingly, the framework re-starts with Preact focus this time, as well as a whole bunch of principles which sound no less pompous and philosophical than the Redwood’s manifesto. It’s quite an anticipated move from the React Router team though, as they know a thing or two about hype, that’s for sure.

We’ve had ideas that felt too disruptive to pursue in the past. But with Remix no longer tied to a specific paradigm, we have the freedom to explore them.

It still feels though that you can replace “Remix” in this message with anything else from the tech Twitter discourse and still keep the meaning (or rather the lack of it?).

Anyway, I hope we will come to a peaceful equilibrium between the pathos and value (maybe with a good help of tools like Rolldown-Vite, for instance, why not) but in a reasonable way, because as Wilhelm Stekel said, “It’s not the hero who dies nobly for the cause, it’s who humbly lives for it”.

The Noteworthy

The chatty guys from Syntax.fm podcast were talking about one famous metaframework (which consistently doesn’t hesitate to use “magic” and complexity while silently and consistently delivering tons of value to the whole ecosystem in the background) in their episode called “You Should Learn Nuxt!”. Worth listening to as a sobering reminder that not everything that is complex is actually bad.

The interesting article about another “monster”, Next.js, and its usage of server actions came from a young-blood rebel not (yet?) spoiled (enlightened?) by the desire to change the world by getting rid of unnecessary abstractions. Importantly, the security concerns related to factual API endpoints are raised there, and it’s hard to overestimate the meaning of this message.

Server Actions are public API endpoints, and should be treated with the same precautions as traditional APIs are.

New big releases have come from Docusaurus (v3.8) (huge performance wins even the Vite guys would be proud of!) and Vitest (v3.2) (impossibly fancy and rad in a niche way, check it out!) this last week, and this pair is a go-to one for docs and tests for web dev projects lately.

And one last thing I anticipate each month end is the regular “What’s new in Astro” summary. As usual, it sounds too good to be true, but it is. And there is the rebel spirit in some of the parts too. This is the way.

Some ecosystem news may be too intimidating sometimes, causing you to feel like “what am I doing in this world at all while these cool people are changing the universe”. But do not let that (and the fear of missing out) discourage you from living your best developer life while savoring the best of the metaframework world developments. These tools are not that huge and not that fancy. Some of them are just abstracted web platform primitives; others — the fruit of many years of labor which you also can reproduce.

If you will. And if you dare.

👋