es-module-shims VS fresh

For full compatibility and extra features, we usually use the library es-module-shims.

You can polyfill for unsupported browsers, it works surprisingly well: https://github.com/guybedford/es-module-shims

https://github.com/guybedford/es-module-shims has a polyfill. (But it is fairly large: 53KB raw, 15KB gzipped, 32KB minified, 11KB minified+gzipped. It’s providing a lot of likely-unnecessary functionality. I’d prefer a stripped-down polyfill that can also be lazily-loaded, controlled by a snippet of at most a few hundred bytes that you can drop into the document, only loading the polyfill in the uncommon case that it’s needed—like how five years ago as part of modernising some of the code of Fastmail’s webmail, I had it fetch and execute core-js before loading the rest iff !Object.values (choosing that as a convenient baseline), so that the cost to new browsers of supporting old browsers was a single trivial branch, and maybe fifty bytes in added payload.)

If we call the shim a framework, would you be ok with it then?

If you want import maps to be supported in any browser, there is an ES Module Shims polyfill which is compatible with any browser that has baseline ES Module Support (i.e. Edge 17+, Firefox 60+, Safari 10.1+, and Chrome 61+).

An example of a polyfill that can be used is the ES Module Shims polyfill that adds support for import maps and other new module features to any browser with baseline support for ES modules (about 94% of browsers). All you need to do is include the es-module-shim script in your HTML file before your import map script:

i often use es-module-shims so i can load npm packages in browsers without a bundler 😎

I explored using client-side service workers for build-less deployment workflows a while back, but the blocker was the initial visit when the service worker hasn't been installed yet. Ended up using es-module-shim's fetch hook (https://github.com/guybedford/es-module-shims#fetch-hook) instead, which worked quite well.

I kept the demo repo around here, in case it's helpful to anyone: https://github.com/lewisl9029/buildless-hot-reload-demo.

The repo itself is quite out of date at this point, but my current project, Reflame, is essentially the spiritual successor: https://reflame.app/

Reflame has the same ideals of achieving the developer experience I've always wanted for building client rendered React apps:

- instant production deployments (usually <200ms)

- instant preview environments that match production in pretty much every imaginable way (including the URL), that can also be flipped into development mode for fast-refresh (for the seamless feedback loop we're used to in local dev) and dev-mode dependencies (for better error messaging, etc)

- close-to-instant browser tests (1-3 seconds) that enable image snapshot comparisons that run with maximum parallelism and only rerun when their dependency graphs change

The problem of course is that browser-support for Import Maps is sadly lacking (only Chrome/Chromium-based at time of writing). There are tricks/shims to get around this, like ES-Module-Shims. I find these approaches to be a little too intrusive, personally.

Deno: Deno with one of it's frameworks (like Fresh

The road to Fresh 2.0 (https://github.com/denoland/fresh/issues/2363) by Marvin Hagemeister Can't wait for seeing the end of the road! All in all great changes ahead.

Because I have secret magical powers that you probably don't, it's basically free for me. Here's the breakdown though:

The application server uses Deno and Fresh (https://fresh.deno.dev) and requires a shared-1x CPU at 512 MB of ram. That's $3.19 per month as-is. It also uses 2GB of disk volume, which would cost $0.30 per month.

As far as post generation goes: when I first set it up it used GPT-3.5 Turbo to generate prose. That cost me rounding error per month (maybe like $0.05?). At some point I upgraded it to GPT-4 Turbo for free-because-I-got-OpenAI-credits-on-the-drama-day reasons. The prose level increase wasn't significant.

With the GPU it has now, a cold load of the model and prose generation run takes about 1.5 minutes. If I didn't have reasons to keep that machine pinned to a GPU (involving other ridiculous ventures), it would probably cost about 5 minutes per day (increased the time to make the math easier) of GPU time with a 40 GB volume (I now use Nous Hermes Mixtral at Q5_K_M precision, so about 32 GB of weights), so something like $6 per month for the volume and 2.5 hours of GPU time, or about $6.25 per month on an L40s.

In total it's probably something like $15.75 per month. That's a fair bit on paper, but I have certain arrangements that make it significantly less cheap for me. I could re-architect Arsène to not have to be online 24/7, but it's frankly not worth it when the big cost is the GPU time and weights volume. I don't know of a way to make that better without sacrificing model quality more than I have to.

For a shitpost though, I think it'd totally worth it to pay that much. It's kinda hilarious and I feel like it makes for a decent display of how bad things could get if we go full "AI replaces writers" like some people seem to want for some reason I can't even begin to understand.

I still think it's funny that I have to explicitly tell people to not take financial advice from it, because if I didn't then they will.

Deno has also created a Next.js competitor, Fresh. I found it a few weeks ago and am starting to go through the docs, looks like a good overall concept. https://fresh.deno.dev/

https://fresh.deno.dev/ - Fresh embraces the tried and true design of server side rendering and progressive enhancement on the client side.

Along the way, I not only got the oppurtunity to revise old concepts that had blurred in my memory, but also learnt about new technologies like Fresh.js, a framework from Deno (a js runtime engine) that uses Preact, a React Routing library and used Chakra UI for the first time.

A whole project might be released as a server or framework. Frameworks like fresh, and astro) both have had things deep within them that I've wanted to reuse, within fresh it's the esbuild configuration, and islands functionality, and within astro it's the rendering of astro files themselves.

The Fresh framework by Deno cited an improved developer experience due to tighter feedback loops.