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WASM and Web Workers- unless carefully used - won't magically make your UI snappy.
There are three reasons (for the vast majority of apps) that a UI feels sluggish:
1. The network! Requesting data from a server is slow, by far the slowest aspect of any app. As a start, prefetch and cache, use a CDN, try edge platforms that move data and compute closer to the user. However, if you can explore Local First (http://localfirstweb.dev), for a web app it is the way we should be looking to build in future.
2. They are doing work on the UI thread that takes longer than 16ms. This is where Web Workers are perfect, the DX around them isn't perfect, as another comment suggested Comlink helps, but there is a lot of opportunity here to build abstractions that help devs.
3. Excessive animations that delay user interaction - there is so much bad UX where animations have been added that only make things slower. Good animations have a purpose, showing where something came from or is going, and never get in the way.
Finally, we are well into diminishing returns with front end frameworks optimising the way they do templating and update the DOM. The key thing there now is DX, that is how you pick a framework, benchmarks are almost always useless.
> if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly.
Get prepared to be blown away by Makepad [0]. I have no affiliation with them, but just watched their most recent conference presentation [1]. The slides were made with Makepad itself and included, embedded, a full-blown IDE, a synthesizer app, a Mandelbrod to zoom in endlessly, and more. All running at 120fps. The presentation is for the most part live-coding with this setup.
What they want to do is bring coders and designers closer together, and while some code is in Rust they developed a DSL for the GUI parts that is close to how Figma works. These GUI's can run anywhere.
And I couldn't help thinking "Why would people have complicated stacks to create Web 2.0 apps for the Google Web, when they have this?", in other words an opportunity to break out of the browser straitjacket.
[0] https://github.com/makepad/makepad
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC4FCS-oMpg
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