million VS sst

Hey HN! Founder of Million – We’re building a tool to that helps fix slow React code. Here is a quick demo: https://youtu.be/k-5jWgpRqlQ

Fixing web performance issues is hard. Every developer knows this experience: we insert console.log everywhere, catch some promising leads, but nothing happens before "time runs out." Eventually, the slow/buggy code never gets fixed, problems pile up on a backlog, and our end users are hurt.

We started Million to fix this. A VSCode extension that identifies slow code and suggests fixes (like ESLint, for performance!) The website is here: https://million.dev/blog/lint

I realized this was a problem when I tried to write an optimizing compiler for React in high school (src: https://github.com/aidenybai/million). It garnered a lot of interest (14K+ stars) and usage, but it didn't solve all user problems.

Traditionally, devtools either hinge on full static analysis OR runtime profiling. We found success in a mixture of the two with dynamic analysis. During compilation, we inject instrumentation where it's necessary. Here is an example:

  function App({ start }) {

To be honest, it fills me with great joy to finally be able to witness the launch of the 3.0.0 major release of Million.js; this is something that has been talked about since maybe July 2023, but, Aiden Bai finally assembled a team to get it out there and just last week on the day 2 February as at 8:00 am PST (Pacific Standard Time) Million v3 was released!!

>> React is not traditionally used for making games, but that's part of the fun and the challenge. R

> MS Flight Simulator cockpits are built with MSFS Avionics Framework which is React-like and MIT licensed:

https://github.com/microsoft/msfs-avionics-mirror/tree/main/...

preactjs may or may not be faster: https://preactjs.com/

Million.js is faster than preact, and lists a number of references under Acknowledgements: https://github.com/aidenybai/million#acknowledgments

https://million.dev/docs :

> We use a novel approach to the virtual DOM called the block virtual DOM. You can read more on what the block virtual DOM is with Virtual DOM: Back in Block and how we make it happen in React with Behind the block().*

React API reference > Components > Profiler:

Consider replacing the default virtual DOM with an alternative solution. For instance, Million.js

@aidenybai 's Millionjs

In brief: I'm Aiden, 18, and have spent the past 2 years of high school working on Million.js, an open source React alternative with 11K stars on GitHub and hundreds of thousands of npm downloads.

Recently, I released automatic mode, which detects slow React components and automatically optimizes the reconciliation phase. It's still in beta but chugging along. It's around 70% faster than React on the JS Framework Benchmark and you can see how I did it here: https://million.dev/blog/virtual-dom

Interested? Check it out here: https://million.dev

Either that or add signals to the library itself. I don't get why it isn't in there when a ton of React's competitors are either using signal-like behavior or forgoing the clearly-obsolete way React handles its VDOM. When a high schooler can create something to make the library faster, you know that the core team is either prioritizing the wrong things or someone managing React is too prideful to admit that a lot of what worked a decade ago doesn't work today.

Reference: https://million.dev/

We see some great results from using these in conjunction with frameworks such as SST or Serverless, and also some real spaghetti from people who organically proliferate 100’s of functions over time and lose track of how they relate to each other or how to update them safely across time and service. Buyer beware!

> But if you have a sufficiently large enough API surface, doing one lambda per endpoint comes with a lot of pain as well. Packaging and deploying all of those artifacts can be very time consuming, especially if you have a naive approach that does a full rebuild/redeploy every time the pipeline runs.

Yeah, thankfully SST [0] does the heavy lifting for me. I've tried most of the solutions out there and SST was where I was the happiest. Right now I do 1 functions per endpoint. I structure my code like url paths mostly, 1 stack per final folder, so that the "users" folder maps to "/users/*" and inside I have get/getAll/create/update/delete files that map to GET X/id, GET X, POST X, POST X/id, DELETE/id. It works out well, it's easy to reason about, and deploys (a sizable a backend) in about 10min on GitHub Actions (which I'm going to swap out probably for something faster).

I agree with the secrets/permissions aspect and I like that it's stupid-simple for me to attach secrets/permissions at a low level if I want.

I use NodeJS and startup isn't horrible and once it's up the requests as very quick. For my needs, an the nature of the software I'm writing, lambda makes a ton of sense (mostly never used, but when it's used it's used heavily and needs to scale up high).

[0] https://sst.dev

We will start by building a project with SST that provisions an API Gateway, a Lambda, and an S3 bucket. Once implemented, we'll look into testing for concurrent write conflicts or exceeding capacity limits.

I recently deployed a node websocket server using the SST Service construct. Until this point my stack had been functions and buckets. While I had no users 😢, I also had no costs 🤡.

Most my personal and side-business projects have very spiky load or just low load in general. Because of that I love using AWS Lambda as my backend since it scales to 0 and scales to whatever you have your limits set at.

I use SST [0] for my backend with NodeJS (TypeScript) and Vue (Quasar) for my frontend. For my database I use either Postgres or DynamoDB if the fit is right (Single Table Design is really neat). For Postgres I like Neon [1] though their recent pricing changes make it less appealing.

[0] https://sst.dev

[1] https://neon.tech

Yup. Entire core business product for a succeeding startup, though it's a small team of contributors (<10), and a much smaller platform team. Serverless backend started in 2018. Been a blessing in many regards, but it has its warts (often related to how new this architecture is, and of course we've made our own mistakes along the way).

I really like the model of functions decoupled through events. Big fan of that. It's very flexible and iterative. Keep that as your focus and it's great. Be careful of duplicating config, look for ways to compose/reuse (duh, but definitely a lesson learnt) and same with CI, structure your project so it can use something off-the-shelf like serverless-compose. Definitely monorepo/monolith it, I'd be losing my mind with 100-150 repos/"microservices" with a team this size. If starting now I'd maybe look at SST framework[0] because redeploying every change during development gets old fast

I couldn't go back to any other way to be honest, for cloud-heavy backends at least. By far the most productive I've ever been

Definitely has its warts though, it's not all roses.

[0] http://sst.dev

Along the way, you find an excellent framework, SST. Which is much faster than CDK and provides a better DX1. Here is how you then define your MultiPipelineStack.

SST is a powerful framework that simplifies the development of serverless applications. It offers a straightforward and opinionated approach to defining serverless apps using TypeScript. Built on top of AWS CDK, SST handles the complexity of setting up your serverless infrastructure automatically. SST is an open-source framework and is completely free to use.

SST is an open-source framework designed to facilitate the development and deployment of Serverless stacks on AWS. It operates under the hood by integrating with Amazon CDK. However, its primary benefit is in allowing us to concentrate on creating resources using familiar languages like TypeScript, treating them as Infrastructure as Code (IaC).