lingo.dev VS giscus

If you've read my previous articles on HTML5 elements you didn't know you need or CSS modal windows, you know we like unusual tech at Lingo.dev. These upcoming JavaScript features solve real problems that have annoyed developers for years.

At Lingo.dev, we've been using this a lot deep inside our localization API, and it's dramatically simplified our text processing pipeline. What used to require multiple specialized libraries and server-side processing can now be handled directly in the browser with just a few lines of code.

As you know, we love unusual tech at Lingo.dev. So when in my last essay, David commented he was surprised to not see "dialog" HTML element, it hit me - wait, but there's so many HTML5 elements that we don't even know about!

Wait, you can build modal windows without JavaScript? Yep, that's CSS secretly laughing at JavaScript behind its back. At Lingo.dev, we love diving into weird engineering rabbit holes that make other devs do a double-take.

At lingo.dev, we're always on top of the latest models to ensure our translations are perfect. So when Meta released Llama 4, I immediately dug into what makes it special and how we developers can leverage its power without the infrastructure headaches.

In this post, I'll walk you through how to build an automated CI/CD translation pipeline using Lingo.dev and Knock that will handle localized notifications for your app without requiring any manual translation work from your team. We’ll introduce some tools that can help you scale your application to a global audience, automate translations locally using Lingo.dev's CLI, and finally integrate that CLI into a CI/CD pipeline so that translations are automatically created when developers open a pull request.

Hey! Max here, one of the co-founders - great question!

Technically - it's a compiler plugin: it augments build artifacts, so that extracting text from the app into JSON files for further translation is no longer required.

Since we're solving the problem at compile time, React code remains the same, but the app becomes just one cli command away from being fully translated into other languages!

Here's me speedrunning (~2min?) the localization of a typical next js app from english to spanish: https://github.com/replexica/replexica/blob/main/getting-sta...

Since our site is a static site, we need to rely on external services to provide a comment system. The most famous one is Disqus. However, its free plan forces use to show a lot of ADs to the users, which I dont like. So I chose giscus, which uses GitHub Discussions as the storage place for comments. The only downside is that it doesnt allow users to log in and comment with Google or social media accounts like Disqus does, but since my articles are mostly technical, people reading them are likely to have a GitHub account, so its not a big issue.

That project also has Github issues and discussions pages to ask questions and get help.

When creating my blog-centric personal portfolio, I had a goal of launching it as soon as possible. However, considering including a comment feature, the implementation process could be time-consuming. That's when I started looking for a solution that was easy to set up yet provided essential commenting functionalities. It was during this search that I stumbled upon Giscus.

But now, a new fellow named giscus commenting system has entered the town, it's basically powered by github. Since I already host my blog on github pages, this should be a natural choice for me, right? Many bloggers seem to be migrating to this new system and I might too soon. The downsides however are as follows:

Get Giscus here.

Supports Giscus - a comments system powerd by Github Discussions.

I've encountered https://github.com/utterance/utterances, which relies on github issues for providing a blog comments system of a sort.

Alternatively there's https://github.com/giscus/giscus, which instead uses github discussions.

Haven't used either so can't comment (heh) on their "performance".

There's also a recent similar tool called https://github.com/giscus/giscus that uses Github Discussions as the backing system, rather than Issues.