[HN Gopher] A Supermarket Bag and a Truckload of FOMO
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       A Supermarket Bag and a Truckload of FOMO
        
       Author : julik
       Score  : 108 points
       Date   : 2025-04-07 21:10 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.julik.nl)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.julik.nl)
        
       | throwanem wrote:
       | I have genuinely never understood Tailwind's value proposition,
       | other than as padding for its developers' CVs, at which I assume
       | it excels.
       | 
       | We stopped inlining style attributes for a reason - is this just
       | how the next generation needs to learn?
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | The comparison to inline styles is understandable but misses
         | Tailwind's real value. Inline styles failed because they were
         | arbitrary, inconsistent, and impossible to scale. Tailwind, by
         | contrast, offers a constrained, standardized set of utilities
         | that enforce consistency, simplify maintenance, and reduce CSS
         | complexity. For example, instead of arbitrary inline styles
         | like `style="padding:7px; margin-left:3px; font-size:14px;"`,
         | Tailwind provides predictable classes like `p-2 ml-1 text-sm`,
         | ensuring uniformity across your app.
        
           | timr wrote:
           | > Tailwind provides predictable classes like `p-2 ml-1 text-
           | sm`, ensuring uniformity across your app.
           | 
           | This is literally what bootstrap did/does. You could also
           | trivially do this yourself with just a tiny bit of discipline
           | -- it's part of why variables were valuable in SASS/SCSS.
           | 
           | Why must we re-invent CSS to get semantic class names? Like
           | the parent, I have yet to hear an explanation for Tailwind
           | that doesn't sound like _" someone who didn't fully
           | understand CSS re-wrote it, and a generation of bootcamp
           | coders adopted it without knowing why, or what came before."_
        
             | throwanem wrote:
             | I didn't say word one about "bootcamp coders." That's all
             | you, pal.
             | 
             | Every generation has to invent sex and politics for itself,
             | or at least imagine for a while in its 20s and 30s that it
             | did. Why not the same in another preparadigmatic field like
             | computing?
        
               | timr wrote:
               | Yeah, I know. That's all me.
               | 
               | > Every generation has to invent sex and politics for
               | itself, or at least imagine for a while in its 20s and
               | 30s that it did. Why not the same in another
               | preparadigmatic field like computing?
               | 
               | Because it's not "preparadigmatic"? There was a perfectly
               | good paradigm before it was tossed out and re-written in
               | Javascript (and then again in some other language,
               | apparently). There have certainly been some revolutionary
               | paradigms in my career (e.g. the web itself), but this
               | "reinvention" of basic front-end tech doesn't qualify.
               | 
               | This stuff holds back the industry. It's part of why
               | software engineers over the age of 30 are considered
               | "old".
        
               | throwanem wrote:
               | Yes, and it is also what doesn't really appear to happen
               | in _mature_ engineering fields, isn 't it? No one is
               | reinventing, I don't know, _bolts._ Or ohms, or amperes,
               | or how one determines a Young 's modulus. In those fields
               | you see incremental refinements; mostly, when you see
               | claims of major revolutions, like the recent flap over
               | supposed high-temperature superconductivity in the
               | "LK-99" material, mostly those receive deep suspicion
               | that typically turns out to be justified, because these
               | are fields where exist sizable, coherent bodies of well-
               | tested and reliably predictive theory whose consequences
               | can for most purposes be taken as known. If there is any
               | similar body of knowledge in this engineering discipline
               | then the discipline _still_ qualifies as preparadigmatic
               | for having developed a paradigm its exponents failed to
               | become competent to transmit. But I think there simply
               | exists next to none of such knowledge.
               | 
               | (Even the damned _alchemists_ have their ball-and-stick
               | models! And sure, we have S-expressions, had them for
               | something like seventy years, and do we use them? Do we,
               | _hell..._ )
               | 
               | It's how you get people thinking that the web was
               | revolutionary, and not a product of decades and
               | generations of work toward the concept of a global
               | communications network. But the idea that this inchoate
               | condition holds back the industry doesn't seem to me to
               | hold much water. The first boilers blew up a lot too,
               | before the underlying principles were understood, and
               | mere prolonged survival quickly came to be seen as no
               | mean qualification in a steam engineer. How much did that
               | "hold back" the building of railroads, from where the
               | trains were to where the money was? That, if you care to
               | know, is the overarching metaphor with which I like to
               | describe this industry - though I concede the machines we
               | build are not nearly so hazardous to we ourselves.
               | 
               | If I had to boil down my entire analysis of this industry
               | to something expressible in a single adjective, the only
               | word to fit would certainly be "irresponsible." But I'll
               | also mention at this time that I topped out at a high-
               | school diploma on a sub-3.0 GPA, so if as the holder of a
               | doctorate you find you begin to become bored or
               | uncomfortable talking with me, experience strongly
               | suggests the option of impugning any or all of my
               | intellect, discipline, character, and decency of
               | motivation in speaking is always available as a resort.
        
               | refulgentis wrote:
               | Buddy it's inline syntax for referencing constants in a
               | design system (same on GPA stuff, 2.8 here)
        
               | throwanem wrote:
               | Yeah, but it's also important to me I don't get mistaken
               | for wanting to stand next to a guy who's comfortable
               | displaying that kind of attitude. I think my original
               | approach inadvertently encouraged that, so I'm
               | overcompensating now.
               | 
               | And given a somewhat thoroughly developed analysis of
               | this extremely young industry's place in the span of
               | human history to date, why _not_ talk about that when I
               | can spare the time? I feel like I 'm probably not the
               | only person here who finds such ideas of interest.
        
           | throwanem wrote:
           | Okay, that's reasonable, I see value there and have worked
           | productively with similar systems in pure CSS and relatively
           | lightweight Sass. The next thing I'd like to see addressed is
           | why something so conceptually straightforward still needs so
           | heavyweight a build step that it has to care what _ISA_ it
           | runs on.
           | 
           | (Full disclosure, I haven't worked with Tailwind since 2020
           | or so. Though I was obviously not too favorably impressed by
           | it, I don't recall it having problems like this then, which
           | if anything I'd expect to have been exacerbated by the Apple
           | CPU architecture transition then ongoing.)
        
       | Levitating wrote:
       | > See, I know that shipping end-user software - like the Tailwind
       | compiler - if that software is written in an interpreted language
       | - is fucking hard.
       | 
       | This I don't get. This is interpreted code, most web backends
       | integrate node, why not just ship a node module? Why in gods name
       | ship bun.
       | 
       | The whole web development scene has had some of the worst
       | software engineering I've ever seen. With the exception of the
       | Ruby scene, we have Tilt and Nokogiri for these types of things.
        
         | davedx wrote:
         | Speed, I guess?
         | 
         | Although I use tailwind on all my projects and not once have I
         | thought "oh boy, development is so slow because of tailwind, I
         | sure wish it was implemented in a compiled language!"
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | A lot of CSS tooling feels designed to overcomplicate it so it
         | feels more like "engineering" rather than "markup". I find
         | Tailwind particularly bizarre, essentially writing your CSS as
         | inline styles via single use non-semantic classes is absurd to
         | me.
         | 
         | Wasn't CSS invented so we didn't have to write every html
         | element "its blue, centered text and bold font" yet people
         | willingly choose to use class="items-center font-bold text-
         | blue-600" and running it through a compiler.
        
           | rsynnott wrote:
           | Huh. Yeah, I'd never heard of Tailwind before, but this looks
           | suspiciously like how people formatted HTML _before_ CSS
           | existed.
        
             | cess11 wrote:
             | If all your frontend code lives in component files then it
             | is quite nice that all the styling is also local to those
             | components so you don't end up with horrors in unexpected
             | places because you changed a line in a CSS file.
             | 
             | Since it's already in component files you can use the
             | templating already present in that context to fill in
             | values from colour schemes and so on, without the hazards
             | of cascading.
        
           | cess11 wrote:
           | I have an LLM synthesised HTML file that links in a remote
           | tailwind.css and contains no script tags or any JS at all. It
           | contains a lot of class="bg-cover bg-center h-screen" and
           | class="text-3xl font-bold text-gray-800 mb-4" that I don't
           | really understand, and this file renders just fine in a web
           | browser.
           | 
           | Where do you expect that compiler to come into this? Or is it
           | me that doesn't understand Tailwind and this is actually not
           | Tailwind, just some random CSS with the same name that a
           | compressed database puked up for me?
        
             | whywhywhywhy wrote:
             | > Where do you expect that compiler to come into this?
             | 
             | Whole article is about getting the tailwind compiler and
             | its dependencies up and running on a 12 year old CPU so it
             | must be important somehow...
        
               | cess11 wrote:
               | OK, but I don't recognise this from my scant experience
               | with Tailwind, which consists of either having a
               | framework do whatever it does with ":tailwind" (maybe
               | it's a compiler, I don't know) which it has done without
               | me noticing anything at all or putting a link in a link-
               | element to pull in a CSS.
               | 
               | So I'm wondering whether this compiler/preprocessor stuff
               | is actually something people run into and my experience
               | is deceptive, or if it's something happening to few
               | people, on the margins, that I'll likely never
               | experience.
               | 
               | Because it matters to me, since I'm not going to spend
               | time digesting the Tailwind docs and whatnot and will
               | forever stay a casual, disinterested user that cribs some
               | stuff I don't understand from search interfaces. If I
               | can't expect this to continue working as it has I'll have
               | to figure out a way to ditch the Tailwind stuff I'm
               | already using.
        
             | julik wrote:
             | I know the feeling. The way it works is that Tailwind
             | parses your HTML, finds `mb-4` and thus knows that it needs
             | to emit the `.mb-4 { margin-bottom: some-var-calc-thing-
             | in-4-increments-of-your-layout }.
             | 
             | So it is not as much of a compiler - it is a preprocessor,
             | with the idea being to output just the utility classes that
             | you use. With "all" the utility classes being this multi-MB
             | CDN version... only if it worked.
        
               | cess11 wrote:
               | Is there somehow a preprocessor invoked through the link-
               | element? Or is this about some optional stuff to produce
               | custom Tailwind style CSS files?
        
               | julik wrote:
               | No, the pre-processor has to be running continuously in
               | "watch" mode with patterns for all your HTML (and sorta-
               | HTML) files. When it detects a change in one of them, it
               | chews through the changed file and emits a .css file into
               | your web root which is the particular subset of Tailwind
               | you are actually using.
        
           | graemep wrote:
           | > Wasn't CSS invented so we didn't have to write every html
           | element "its blue, centered text and bold font" yet people
           | willingly choose to use class="items-center font-bold text-
           | blue-600" and running it through a compiler.
           | 
           | Tailwind is far from the first framework to require it.
           | Bootstrap has things like .center and its entire basis are
           | layout classes for the grid. its responsive by default, but
           | not semantic.
           | 
           | I think CSS has failed because people want far more control
           | on appearance (for branding and aesthetics) than the people
           | devising it anticipated.
           | 
           | The motivation for semantic markup has also reduced because
           | people write much less HTML. You might have some markup in
           | what you edit, but the layout and base styles are usually
           | generated by a system (e.g. a CMS). Even most people serving
           | static files use a site generator.
        
           | immibis wrote:
           | Someone told me about Tailwind last week on IRC, and I
           | literally do not see the point of writing class="font-bold"
           | versus style="font-weight:bold;" especially if the former
           | means you have to add a whole bunch more complexity to your
           | build process (and to _have_ a build process at all).
           | 
           | I wrote my website in C, so I don't know about this modern
           | web process stuff.
        
         | julik wrote:
         | > Why in gods name ship bun.
         | 
         | I try to avoid that strong of a language (although believe me -
         | when this was going about I was very, very angry indeed). I
         | think the reason was exactly removing the "npm hell" for users
         | and not requiring any dependencies for using Tailwind.
         | 
         | The irony of it being, of course, that for some situations Bun
         | turned out _more_ of a problem than shipping npm modules would
         | be.
         | 
         | I was also advised to "use Tailwind as an NPM module for now".
         | Only - I couldn't because the only "pure-JS" variant I could
         | find was some months old, and the current builds all work
         | through that bun-based 100MB binary.
         | 
         | The idea was good. The execution by the maintainers - and this
         | is my subjective opinion, again - is not. An experimental JS
         | runtime supported by one person is not a good fit for this.
        
         | julik wrote:
         | Most likely they decided to go for a binary so that people with
         | other runtimes could use Tailwind without subscribing to the
         | whole Node+npm ordeal. And it's actually neat when it works -
         | for us RoR folks it makes things like tailwindcss-rails
         | possible - where there isn't any Node stuff installed at all.
        
       | arealaccount wrote:
       | I was hesitant to give tailwind a try, like most aging web
       | developers I couldn't stand that it breaks the "cascading" part
       | of CSS.
       | 
       | But eventually I didn't have choice as I inherited a web app that
       | has all of the newfangled build components that web apps come
       | with. I love that we're coming full circle back to MVC with
       | server components.
       | 
       | After getting used to it, I ended up liking Tailwind, mostly
       | because it breaks the cascading part of CSS. There are so many
       | unique parts to webpages these days that I think it makes sense
       | to keep the styles close to their components, as opposed to
       | global cascading components.
        
         | mmcclure wrote:
         | Yeah, I've been a fairly vocal curmudgeon about Tailwind within
         | my team. Some folks really like it. They're doing the work and
         | I trust them, so I rolled with it.
         | 
         | I still have qualms with Tailwind. My classic CSS sensibilities
         | are offended, but whatever. The part that I still don't like is
         | really what this post boils down to: a massively complex build
         | system that creates footguns in the weirdest places.
         | 
         | That being said, Tailwind that's set up well in coordination
         | with a complex design system really does feel like it's a win.
         | Seeing that in action was an aha moment where I was able to see
         | value that made some of the tradeoffs worth it.
        
           | yurishimo wrote:
           | The other thing that people seem to just either forget or
           | ignore is that you can do _both_ things! Tailwind can be used
           | for the areas that it makes sense for, and you can write a
           | sitewide layout using insane (in a good way!) grid
           | declarations using plain old CSS and a few extra classes in
           | your markup.
           | 
           | If you're using Vue, you even get a <style> block that can be
           | injected into any component so you're still working in the
           | same context. It's all delightful and optional and you can
           | still do whatever you want.
        
             | douglee650 wrote:
             | Yes, exactly. You can use TW for the utility classes and
             | copy-paste-and-go components, and append your own
             | over/under/side-lay layers to create whatever css you want.
             | 
             | What about a system that could take a really long TW
             | className and let you give it a single name, and you could
             | still append more TW after for here and there adjustments.
        
           | douglee650 wrote:
           | > That being said, Tailwind that's set up well in
           | coordination with a complex design system really does feel
           | like it's a win. Seeing that in action was an aha moment
           | where I was able to see value that made some of the tradeoffs
           | worth it.
           | 
           | Can you elaborate on this a little bit -- was there a lot of
           | Figma tooling, plugins to swap variables between systems,
           | etc?
        
         | julik wrote:
         | The irony is that these days, with nested selectors supported
         | natively, there is zero need to use this heavy of a tool for
         | this isolation.
        
           | candiddevmike wrote:
           | You can use CSS modules with your bundler to isolate things
           | to the file they're imported in:
           | 
           | https://vite.dev/guide/features#css-modules
        
             | julik wrote:
             | I see this is absolutely something I am not going to be
             | using as long as I can help it (it is the same setup as
             | importing CSS and MP4 in Webpack via the import
             | declaration), but a good tidbit to know it exists.
        
       | irrational wrote:
       | I was a web developer from 1996 until 2023. I jumped ship because
       | of exactly this sort of nonsense. I still do private web
       | development, but I do it all using native vanilla HTML, JS, and
       | CSS. It just works.
        
         | wackget wrote:
         | What did you move into?
        
       | haburka wrote:
       | Front end is definitely pretty hard nowadays. It seems like the
       | technology should be easy but keep in mind you're getting
       | everything for free and this isn't the field you have a ton of
       | practice in. It's grown a lot while also being backwards
       | compatible with browsers which are some of the more complicated
       | pieces of software.
       | 
       | Trust me, I get very confused and frustrated whenever I have to
       | figure out python deps or kubernetes, but I accept it's going to
       | be difficult since I'm not familiar with the field.
        
         | lelanthran wrote:
         | > It seems like the technology should be easy but keep in mind
         | you're getting everything for free and this isn't the field you
         | have a ton of practice in.
         | 
         | While keeping in mind that this isn't a field that I have a ton
         | of practice in, I can confidently assert that a parser for HTML
         | input that outputs CSS classnames does not need _all of the
         | following_ :
         | 
         | 1. A recent Node (+ dependencies)
         | 
         | 2. Pnpm
         | 
         | 3. Rust (+ dependencies)
         | 
         | 4. Bun build environment
         | 
         | 5. A binary size of 100MB
         | 
         | I'm pretty certain I needed an HTML parser at some point in the
         | past, and it was built as a single standalone file, that
         | compiled to a single standalone ~50Kb binary, that took a
         | single day to write.
         | 
         | Actually, here it is:
         | https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/896a2d1e228d345ecea66a5b2...
         | 
         | Now, fair enough, that doesn't spit out class names (because I
         | didn't need it at the time, although looking at the query
         | language it seems that it might be able to do that) that, but
         | it's _very easy_ to add a single flag for  "spit out class
         | names". The build dependencies are:
         | 
         | 1. A C compiler.
         | 
         | There's no makefile/build-script - simply doing `$CC program.c
         | -o program` is sufficient.
         | 
         | So, sure, while I don't have a ton of practice in this area, I
         | have enough to know that the binary/program in question is
         | heavily over-engineered. Their dependencies are artificial
         | requirements (we require this because this other technology
         | requires it), not functional requirements (we require this
         | because this feature requires it).
        
           | unwind wrote:
           | Nice! Micro-fix: you should remove the final `;` in the
           | `FPRINTF()` macro definition, that's supposed to be added at
           | the callsite to keep the syntax natural (for C). :)
        
             | lelanthran wrote:
             | > Nice! Micro-fix: you should remove the final `;` in the
             | `FPRINTF()` macro definition, that's supposed to be added
             | at the callsite to keep the syntax natural (for C).
             | 
             | I agree; this was probably an oversight (done in a single
             | day, on a weekend day, so I probably spent no more than
             | about 6 hours on it).
             | 
             | If I want to make this production-ready, I'd move it into a
             | repo, split it into a library (so I can drive it from
             | Python or similar), add some tests, etc...
             | 
             | I literally needed a once-off tool to parse HTML, and had
             | some time to spare.
        
           | julik wrote:
           | So do I, but we were told that "open source is a gift", and I
           | can only have opinions about choices made by others, not
           | command them "do it this way instead". I am not the inventor,
           | owner or maintainer of Tailwind nor do I aspire to be.
           | 
           | And as much as I prefer things be done well instead of....
           | like that... there are only that many hills to die on - and
           | only that many people interested in my opinion :-)
        
             | lelanthran wrote:
             | You're a much more patient person than I am.
             | 
             | I would've literally opened an editor, wrote a quick parser
             | in JS, bundled it in and be done with the problem without
             | going any further.
             | 
             | This functionality, if I am understanding correctly, is to
             | grab all the classnames from HTML files and then pass that
             | to a tool that includes those, and only those, in a .css
             | file.
             | 
             | I'll burnout in no time if I spend even 20% of my time
             | working on configuring or debugging the environment and the
             | rest on the development activities[1]. I can't imagine
             | roles where time is split 50/50 (or more) between "fiddling
             | with YAML, npm, AWS, etc" and "development".
             | 
             | [1] I include requirements elicitation, debugging, talking
             | to customers, etc as "development activities".
        
               | julik wrote:
               | > You're a much more patient person than I am.
               | 
               | That is very kind of you to say, thank you!
        
       | zem wrote:
       | reading that really makes me wish there were a compiled-to-
       | static-binary language with a reasonably easy migration path from
       | javascript (sort of like ruby->crystal, where the latter tries
       | hard to look like ruby so that at least some fraction of your
       | code translates mechanically). there really is no reason that a
       | tool like tailwind should be this hard to ship in a robust and
       | compact binary.
        
         | julik wrote:
         | That would be nice. There was also duktape, which was very
         | compact and very embeddable - it could have been a decent
         | carrier for Tailwind too.
        
         | lelanthran wrote:
         | > reading that really makes me wish there were a compiled-to-
         | static-binary language with a reasonably easy migration path
         | from javascript
         | 
         | I'm working on it ;-)
        
           | zem wrote:
           | do tell!
        
             | lelanthran wrote:
             | Still a work in progress, so not much to tell.
        
       | lelanthran wrote:
       | I've got a number of vanilla JS, HTML, CSS libraries that work
       | only from within the browser, using the standard tags to include
       | them.
       | 
       | For me, not having a build-step means that, yes, I miss out on
       | typescript, but the upsides are easier to read, easier debugging
       | and lower cognitive burden during both writing and reading the
       | application.
       | 
       | It means I will never, like the author in the article, spend $X
       | weeks, and then spend a further $Y dollars just to build
       | something "modern".
       | 
       | My "modern looking" applications are developed, and then tested,
       | on a machine from 2010 (1st-gen i7) that has 16GB of RAM and
       | oodles of slow spinning-rust disks, and it isn't painful at
       | all.[1]
       | 
       | [1] It is, in fact, quite nice when I see a client use their
       | system from their own PC and it's just a little bit snappier than
       | I am used to.
        
         | julik wrote:
         | Absolutely with you on "no build". Sometimes it doesn't work
         | (for me - where I need NPM modules with annoying math I don't
         | want to do myself), but the basic premise of "nobuild" is
         | absolutely and completely how it all should have always worked.
         | 
         | It's the JSX+webpack perversion that ruined it for us all.
        
       | davedx wrote:
       | I feel for the author, and influencers have a lot to answer for.
       | Through a lot of this article I was thinking about next.js,
       | another tech you almost have to know to get hired these days, and
       | how much I dislike it for a myriad of reasons, and despite my
       | dislike, Vercel just absolutely dominates at marketing and devrel
       | so here we are, with every startup and even bigger companies
       | using it.
       | 
       | Unfortunately that's the world we live in now.
        
         | julik wrote:
         | That one I try to avoid at all costs, but I hear what you are
         | saying.
         | 
         | The owner of the company selling Next.js and adjacent services
         | is firmly in that list of influencers I have muted going
         | forward.
        
       | fancyfredbot wrote:
       | TLDR; lots of software now relies on AVX2 instructions which
       | aren't present in older x86 hardware. This prevented author from
       | running some web development stuff.
       | 
       | Recompiling the (open source) code should have offered a solution
       | but OP could not make this work.
       | 
       | On some platforms you can emulate the missing AVX2 instructions
       | with intel SDE but not apple.
        
       | rsynnott wrote:
       | I generally have nothing to do with webdev, but my general
       | expectation was always "okay, it's a mess now, and everything is
       | terrible, but everything will settle down eventually". Instead,
       | every time I hear about it, it has somehow gotten worse.
        
         | DistractionRect wrote:
         | This would happen if browser technologies/standards would, you
         | know, standardize. However, everyone and their uncle picks and
         | chooses what they'll support, how they'll support it, and what
         | extensions to the standard they want to champion for
         | "standardization".
        
       | jwr wrote:
       | I find the discussion here somewhat amusing, because I am on
       | another level of disbelief when looking at the state of things in
       | the npm world.
       | 
       | Most people ask "why ship bun (whatever that is), why not just be
       | an npm module".
       | 
       | I am baffled as to why we have forgotten the lost art of spitting
       | out something from a build and then using that thing. As in,
       | "make" producing a CSS file. Or a JavaScript file. Or multiple
       | files. Why does npmness have to force itself into every nook and
       | cranny of our software and consume it all?
       | 
       | In my webapp I use several small CSS and JavaScript libraries,
       | and for building those I use docker containers. The npm horrors
       | live in the docker containers, I try not to look in there, but
       | whatever happens there, a bunch of css and js files come out.
       | Reproducibly. Reliably. And things don't break if there is a
       | headwind or a tailwind (ahem) today on the internet.
        
         | thi2 wrote:
         | So instead of managing your versions in one package.json and
         | installing your dependencies with one npm i command you manage
         | several different docker container that produce builds you then
         | consume?
         | 
         | What kind of horrors did you encounter that led to this
         | abstraction?
        
           | mbreese wrote:
           | I get this. I also do this (to some extent). Instead of
           | installing whatever tooling I need for each project, I'll
           | store the tools in a Docker container. Then I don't have to
           | think about each project and how they interfere with each
           | other. Even better, when something inevitably goes wrong, I
           | can nuke the container from orbit and start over.
        
         | julik wrote:
         | The irony of my situation was that even using a Docker
         | container would not help, because Docker does not emulate CPU
         | instructions.
        
           | candiddevmike wrote:
           | Aren't you referring to Docker multiarch?
        
             | julik wrote:
             | I don't even know what it is, to my shame. I do know that
             | when you run a container it will be calling into the CPU
             | ins directly, unless it concerns something like Rosetta 2 -
             | but even then I don't know whether, say, the AVX2
             | instructions are emulated.
        
       | DeathArrow wrote:
       | I try to stay away as much as I can from front-end, because
       | modern front-end is a shit show.
       | 
       | Unless I do the front-end for my own app and then, the order of
       | preference is server rendered HTML, HTMX, Web Components, Vanilla
       | JS. Stuff I am sure I can maintain with ease 100 years from now.
       | For CSS I would use something simple such as bootstrap.
       | 
       | I kind of agree with the author of using tools you know are
       | reliable as opposed to chasing fads. Of course you must and
       | should learn and use new things, but proceed with care and
       | carefully consider both upside and downsides.
        
       | jorams wrote:
       | I like this post and agree with a lot of what it says. Shipping
       | Bun at this stage is probably not a great idea, particularly with
       | overly-optimistic CPU requirements, and the complexity of the
       | stack is very far from ideal. At the same time some of that
       | criticism seems slightly mistargeted. Bun didn't drop support for
       | your hardware arbitrarily: your OS vendor dropped support for
       | your hardware. Your "computer with 128GB of RAM and 6 CPU cores"
       | is obsolete according to the manufacturer.
       | 
       | This is bad, and it should not be an acceptable situation, but a
       | relatively short support cycle is a choice you made by buying
       | their product. I'm not sure it's right to then blame others for
       | following along.
        
         | julik wrote:
         | The vendor does not officially publish its dropped support. But
         | from a brief piece of research I did, Jared dropped support for
         | macOS 12 before Apple shipped the last update for it.
         | 
         | And while on a formalistic, nitpicky level it is a "what are
         | you complaining about with your old box" - in actuality I do
         | find the idea to require a CPU upgrade to run a CSS pre-
         | processor (a CSS pre-processor! come on! not an H265 encoder.
         | Not some sophisticated animation system. Not an AI blob. A
         | tokenizer for HTML...) absolutely, completely excessive.
         | 
         | And I know why that decision came - it is because building
         | portable binaries for the Mac is a pain in the butt. Well,
         | guess what - if you made the call of shipping a multi-platform
         | runtime - that backwards compat is part and parcel, Apple's
         | LLVM versions, the linker and the dylibs and whatnot.
         | 
         | So no, I understand that you are "right" formally, but the
         | situation this brought me to - I still find bad, and the
         | choices made by the chain of maintainers - I still find
         | inconsiderate.
        
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