mu VS single-spa

Depending on how minimal a distribution you want, a few years ago I had a way to take a single ELF binary created by my computing stack built up from machine code (https://github.com/akkartik/mu) and package it up with just a linux kernel and syslinux (whatever _that_ is) to create a bootable disk image I could then ship to a cloud server (https://akkartik.name/post/iso-on-linode, though I don't use Linode anymore these days) and run on a VPS to create a truly minimal webserver. If this seems at all relevant I'd be happy to answer questions or help out.

This was the thinking behind my https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Yes thank you, I was indeed alluding to https://github.com/akkartik/mu. Perhaps a more precise term would be "software stack".

I built a computer with its own languages, and I consider it to be _less_ cognitive load when everything is in 1/2/3 languages. I don't have to worry that the next program I want to read the sources will require "Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc."

There are other metrics to consider besides your notions of cognitive load and productivity. Inferno predates most of the languages on your list. My computer (https://github.com/akkartik/mu) uses custom languages because I was able to design them to minimize total LoC, and to ensure the dependency graph has no cycles (unlike all of the conventional software stack, at least until https://www.gnu.org/software/mes connects up all the dots).

"Separation of concerns is a hard-won insight."

Absolutely. I'm arguing for separating just concerns, without entangling them with considerations of people.

It's certainly reasonable to consider my projects toy. I consider them research:

* https://github.com/akkartik/mu

* https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

"The idea that projects should take source copies instead of library dependencies is just kind of nuts..."

The idea that projects should take copies seems about symmetric to me with taking pointers. Call by value vs call by reference. We just haven't had 50 years of tooling to support copies. Where would we be by now if we had devoted equal resources to both branches?

"...at least for large libraries."

How are these large libraries going for ya? Log4j wasn't exactly a shining example of the human race at its best. We're trying to run before we can walk.

I still believe :) I'm looking not for an economic argument but for a strategic one. I think[1] a self-hosted setup with minimal dependencies can be more resilient than a conventional one, whether with a vendor or self-hosted.

https://sandstorm.io got a lot right. I wish they'd paid more attention to upgrade burdens.

[1] https://github.com/akkartik/mu

I'm very interested in the network stack, having explored it for a while for https://github.com/akkartik/mu before giving up. What sort of network card do you support?

Single-SPA Framework - One of the most popular choices. It has a large community behind it and offers robust routing and lifecycle management for microapps. Ref - https://single-spa.js.org/

Joel Denning is the visionary behind single-spa, boasting profound insights into the true mechanics of the web and is, in my view, a pioneer in micro frontend architecture. I highly recommend checking the single-spa website and his YouTube channel. While the videos might appear dated at first glance, rest assured, Joel is ahead of his time, and the content remains incredibly relevant today.

You got me curious and I found that single spa is something new to me - if I read https://github.com/single-spa/single-spa then I reckon you can use Svelte(Kit) in such framework - like you can use angular etc

I’ve actually done that “web components as the interoperability layer”!

It was this old angular 1.8 app with new features being written in angular-hybrid-ized angular 8. Ripping out angular-hybrid and separating the angular 1.8 routes from the modern angular routes was difficult, but now they were totally separate.

The only thing linking them together was an object with some RXJS streams in it for state, and a little in-house wrapper “app” who just loaded one component or another depending on the URL and a hash of routes for config. (I’d probably use SingleSPA [1] now. Same thing really.)

We could deploy them separately since the build just ends up being another JS file somewhere that just gets included with a script tag at runtime. No version bumping! No big mega build!

We started replacing the remaining “old” routes 1 by 1 with a “new” counter part. That was the easiest part, and went at a pace devs were comfortable with (fast enough) and business folk could tolerate. (modular enough to not HAVE to be done all at once)

Last I checked, the angular 1.8 stuff is gone years ago. :)

[1] https://single-spa.js.org/

Module Federation is not the unique solution, for example single-spa

You may want to look into using single-spa to run Vue 2 and Vue 3 side by side while you're migrating. Once your app is fully converted, you can stop using single-spa

Single-SPA and module federation are potent tools for building scalable micro-frontends. Single-spa provides a framework for building a modular front-end application. It allows lazy loading of micro-frontends, which helps improve the application's performance. In contrast, module federation enables communication and dependency sharing between different micro-frontends. It reduces code duplication, which can help with scaling an application.

Since micro-frontend allows us to develop applications individually, this also means you can use different frameworks and libraries together to develop each section of this application. Of course, this will have some advantages and disadvantages. If you are using different technologies to serve different parts of the application, it won't be so easy to move developers within teams. However, the door is open, and if you want to do something like that, you could use something like Single SPA, or some other, to help you organize and connect the different technologies into a larger application.