Ask HN: What do you use for front end?

Hello HN,

A while ago after doing some research, I decided to go with VueJS for the frontend of a project I was working on but it feels very clunky and slow. The page size with all the libraries installed is nearly 8MBs.

I'm considering ditching our SPA all together building a flask app to interact with the backend with 0 javascript to reduce the page size and make it faster. I was wondering if there are any lightweight alternatives to Vue or know any good practices for speeding up the SPAs?

5 comments

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eberkund 8y ago ↗

8 MB?

What on earth are you including in your pages?

Kpourdeilami 8y ago ↗

It is a gigantic SPA using Vue, VueMaterial, and D3. It has around ~300 components. I don't know if it would be possible to lazy load some of the components

christophilus 8y ago ↗

8mb is nuts. Is this the minified & gzipped size? Either way, code splitting and dead code elimination are your friends. I wonder if you're including multiple versions of the same libraries, or pulling in heavy libraries for only a handful of features?

Is your code available somewhere for us to look at?

Kpourdeilami 8y ago ↗

8mb is the local version of the code without gzip and minification. I just tested at the minified version and it is 2.5 megabytes

johncoltrane 8y ago ↗

2.5 is still large.

Some ideas:

* split your application into several smaller ones, one for each "domain", with one bundle for your library code and one bundle for each "domain"

* use CDNs instead of bundling third party libraries

* make sure you import only what you use