sciter-js-sdk VS compression-dictionary-transport

- https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk/-/tree/main/b... - Skia backend.

You can load in usciter this document:

https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk/-/blob/main/s...

It shows pretty large colorized texts so you can estimate how Direct2D and Skia handle GPU accelerated text rendering. For these two binaries the difference is only in graphics used - Direct2D and Skia.

Agree about virtualization in principle. Not that nightmarish though.

My Sciter supports built-in virtualization out of the box. But I shall admit that this is second approach to the problem.

Currently Sciter's behavior:virtual-list supports as fixed-height items (that's easy) as variable-height items like messages [1] in chats.

API is relatively simple [2]: single event "contentrequired" that virtual-list sends to JS. In response JS shall either append or prepend requested number of DOM elements to the container (a.k.a. sliding window scroller). Example, grid showing 20000 records: https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk/-/blob/main/s...

[1] https://sciter.com/behaviorvirtual-list-for-sciter-and-scite...

Thank you for your explanation. As for Electron alternatives, Sciter is much more lightweight, supports Vue and includes a native webview. Anyway, good luck with your project!

> we have a number of other libs to integrate, some of which add their own rendering (which requires access to e.g. a Vulkan context, not merely HTML/CSS or other high-level UI elements)…

I have a customer that is doing something close: it is a 3D CAD alike app where they have Vulkan rendering 3D scene with Sciter UI on top of that - rendering chrome UI around that 3D and on the same Vulkan surface.

Sciter API supports rendering in windowless mode (https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk/-/tree/main/d...) where app supplies OpenGL, Vulkan or DirectX context to render on.

> Sorry, but I'll have to pass.

Understood. Sometimes people need not just to get job done but also "OS" label on it.

Attempt to combine all these definition in single language is doomed to fail. If in doubts then look at WPF.

3. Notes on language-behind-UI...

If to consider #2 then such simple thing as JavaScript language and VM are quite adequate to the task. Language-behind-UI do not need to be that performant, but it must be flexible. I may express un-popular opinion but language-behind-UI should be typeless.

Simply put: don't do ray tracing in language-behind-UI. But! Such a language shall have simple mechanism of adding high performant functions. There are good languages that are specifically designed for performance: C, C++, D, Rust, Zig, WebAssembly, etc. You just need convenient mechanism to expose those functions to runtime of language-behind-UI. Like here: https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk/-/blob/main/d...

You need JITs, compilation, fat VMs and runtimes, strong types only if your language is the only mean to define algorithms in whole application. But expect that your code will always be sub-optimal - neither enough performant nor super flexible.

4. Conclusion

Flutter should be something Sciter-alike :) - use [X]HTML/JSX, CSS and some already well known language-behind-UI. JavaScript is the natural choice. If needed you should be able to use native UI components - like in Sciter you can use existing HWND based and windowless native components inside your UI. It may not follow Web UI model on 100% (that's impossible) but to be conceptually close so developers can reuse their skills. Web UI model is conceptually close to Mobile one - all application UI is constrained inside single window.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it but I've been using SciterJS (website) for my most recent project. I wouldn't ever claim it's the best UI framework out there, but it's lightweight and I've never felt so productive - I've rapidly developed my UI and integrated it with my native C++ far faster than I thought possible. I will note that it is far, far cheaper and has so many more features than Ultralight does.

Only when code tries to access props/methods of the loaded object it gets fetched from disk, its __proto__ is set to particular class, etc.

More on this architecture: https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk/-/blob/main/d...

Patched QuickJS with storage support is here: https://gitlab.com/c-smile/quickjspp - it uses DyBase of Konstantin Knizhnik as a storage.

More on i18n support in Sciter.

Sciter got native (built-in) Signal implementation made after PReact's Signals;

> Dictionary entries (or at least the metadata) should be cleared any time cookies are cleared.

So it seems it should not get you anything you cannot already do with cookies.

https://github.com/WICG/compression-dictionary-transport?tab...

Talked about here:

https://github.com/WICG/compression-dictionary-transport

There's a spec up for custom dictionary support across the web. https://github.com/WICG/compression-dictionary-transport

This was one of the major blockers that iirc Mozilla threw in the way of zstd compression support: they said zstd with a standardly accepted dictionary would be too particular & wanted more. With this spec maybe Moz will accept zstd as a web compression standard.

Here here. Today, bundlers may get you to first page load faster. But if a user comes back and you've shipped two small fixes, all those extra wins you get from compressing a bunch files at once fly out the window & you're deep in the red. If you have users that return to your site, and your site is actively developed, bundling is probably a bad tradeoff.

We see similar fixedness in the field all over the place: people freaking love small Docker image sizes & will spend forever making it smaller. But my gosh the number of engineers I've seen fixate on total download size for an image, & ignore everything else, is vast. Same story, but server side: my interest is in the download size for what v1.0.1 of the Docker container looks like once we already have v1.0.0 already shipped. Once we start to consider what the ongoing experience is, rather than just the first time easy-to-judge metric, the pictures all look very different.

Then there's the other thing. The performance reasons for bundling are being eaten away. Preload & Early Hints are both here today & both offer really good tools to greatly streamline asset loading & claw back a lot of turf, and work hand-in-glove with import-maps. The remaining thing everyone points out is that a large bundle compresses better (but again at the cost of making incremental updates bad). The spec is in progress, but compression-dictionary-transport could potentially obliterate that advantage, either make it a non-factor, or perhaps even a disadvantage for large bundles (as one could use a set of dictionaries & go discover which of your handful of dictionaries best compress the code). These dictionaries would again be first-load hit, but could then be used again and again by users, to great effect again for incremental changes. https://github.com/WICG/compression-dictionary-transport

Bundles are such an ugly stain on the web, such an awful hack that betrays the web's better resourceful nature. Thankfully we're finally making real strides against this opaque awful blob we've foisted upon this world. And we can start to undo not just the ugliness, but the terrible performance pains we've created by bundling so much togther.