What's TypeScript compiling? Use a treemap to find out
After years of testing different JS frameworks and build systems, I became convinced that heavy Javascript frontends are <i>generally</i> a bad model for the web.<p>One thing is to generate a build and ship it once over the wire in the form of an Installer or bytecode executable. Another thing is to ship the entire package and/or parts of it with every launch event, plus the complexity of shipping transpiled code to different interpreters (different browser in this case) which adds more complexity to the model until it finally explodes.<p>The server side with HTML generated at the backend is a more predictable, faster and simpler approach. Bandwidth is not the issue anymore, but latency. Heavy API consumption from the client, leaves data exposed and increases the latter.<p>Hotwire/Turboframes/StimulusJS removed the need of generating HTML code at the client, leaving a single source of truth while still having a dynamic/friendly frontend. I consider it to be a better model for the web.<p>Plus, new Page Transition API and Navigation API are possibly game changers for a lot of use cases out here.