You can see this with languages like Rust and Go—they're some of the first low-level programming languages with actually good tooling, and, as a result, they're becoming very popular. I can pull down some code, run `cargo build`, and not have to worry about the right libraries being installed on my system and whether I've generated a Makefile. Packages are easily searchable, hosted on popular platforms like GitHub, and I can file bugs and ask questions without having to join an obscure mailing list or deal with an unfriendly community.

If you want your language/library/framework/layer in the stack to become popular, make the tooling good and make it easy for folks to get their questions answered. Everything else will follow.

It's the only usable form of reference! I want all the details to be presented in a reference. Where else?

> low-level tools are terrible too

It seems to me the author is confusing lack of familiarity with lack of existence. There are lots of fantastic tools out there, you just need to learn them. They don't know them, so conclude they don't exist.

> We could have editor plugins and language servers to help beginners along

We already have all that.

Because of this, I'm really looking forward for PanGUI to step up (https://www.pangui.io/), their UI framework is very promising and I would start using it in a heartbeat when the beta actually releases!

>Building it yourself might sound crazy, but it’s been done successfully many times before—for example, Figma famously built their app from scratch in WASM and WebGL, and it runs shockingly well on very large projects.

Yes, let's hear more about this. "Collapsing Reddit comments could have been like 180ms faster" isn't very convincing to smart, ambitious people deciding what they want to be about. Find more examples like Figma and get people to believe that there's still lots of room for up and comers to make a name for themselves by standing on their performance, and they'll take care of the learning and building themselves.

I think that "the Handmade community" are people who mistook Casey for a messiah, in a sort of "Life of Brian" scenario.

The best part of "Handmade" is when somebody who'd otherwise doubt their ability makes a video game. The resulting games are usually at least interesting, and video games are art so, interesting is enough. If Steam had a dozen interesting crap games for every asset-flip cash-grab piece of junk it would have a very different reputation.

The worst part of "Handmade" is the mob of people who can't and won't make useful software but feel Casey (and much worse Jon Blow and Ginger Bill) has given them permission to criticise anybody who does because the software didn't meet their sky-high expectations.

E.g., develop a generic user interface framework which makes it very quick to produce a standard page with a series of standard fields but at the same time makes it very painful to produce a non-standard layout. After that is done it is 'discovered' that almost all pages are non-standard. But that 'discovery' could also have been made in five minutes by talking to any of the people already working for the company....

Another example: use an agent system where lots of agents do almost nothing, maybe translate one enum value to another enum value of another enum type. Then discover that you get performance problems because agent traffic is quite expensive. At the same time typical java endless typing occurs because of the enormous amount of agent boilerplate. Also the agents that actually do something useful become god classes because basically all non-trivial logic goes there....

Like for example if you're an automotive engineer, you can't go ahead and put in the thickest beams made out of the strongest steel on hand, because the resulting car would weigh 20 tons and cost $300k. To add to that, it would probably drive like crap, and wouldn't even protect the driver that well.

In engineering, even a 10% waste is frowned upon. Here I outlined a waste of 10x. I don't think a Reddit comment opening/closing taking 200ms is a 10x waste, but a couple orders of magnitude more.

Why is that, that despite tons of very highly paid (moreso than any other kind) software 'engineers' work on websites like Reddit (which is not the only example of this trend), the result ends up like this?

It's not the lack of resources, constraints, pace of development (I don't remember the reddit site changing all that much in the past decade).

I think if software engineers have the mindset of other engineers, this thing would be considered ridiculous and unimaginable, like the 20 ton car is for automotive engineers.

But it is also largely about the fact that most people making those js frameworks are not low-level programmers.

Folks really ought to check out Datastar. It's a newish js framework that is extremely innovative despite leaning as much as possible on browser apis. It's htmx + alpine + much more, yet smaller, faster and simpler.

Because it is built by a low-level programmer who is making the framework as a yak shaving side-quest. There's no dependencies - he built his own (world's fastest) signals and DOM morphing algorithms. V1 should be released soonish and they expect to never need a v2 - it'll just work forever (and probably become slimmer as browser capabilities grow).

And when he needs a break from that, he develops innovative approaches to CSS, serialization protocols, and databases.

https://data-star.dev

The discord is a fantastic place as well, of like-minded people.

The specific examples in the article are about UI.

I agree that UI ecosystem is a big and slow mess, because there is actually a LOT of complexity in UIs. I would even argue that there is often more complexity to be found in UIs than in backends (unless you are working on distributed systems, or writing your own database). On backend, you usually just need paralellism (95% of jobs is just parallel for, map-reduce kind of thing).

But in UI, you need concurrency! You have tons of mutable STATE flying around that you need to synchronize - within UI, across threads or with the backend. This is /hard/ - and to come back to the point of the article - the only low-level language that I'm familiar with that can do it well and reliably is Rust.

In Rust, my absolutely favorite UI framework is egui. It is based on immediate mode rendering (maybe you're familiar with dearimgui), rather than the old, familiar-but-complex retained mode. It's really interesting stuff, recommend studying on it! Dearimgui has a wonderful quote that summarizes this well:

> "Give someone state and they'll have a bug one day, but teach them how to represent state in two separate locations that have to be kept in sync and they'll have bugs for a lifetime." -ryg

We use egui in https://minfx.ai (Neptune/Wandb alternative) and working with it is just a joy. Emilk did such a fantastic job bringing egui about! Of course it has its flaws (most painful is layouting), but other than that it's great!

What did we gain exactly? Reddit is better at displaying videos and images now. But it's slower despite faster hardware.

> New Reddit was a React app

Many such cases. React is basically synonymous with horrible lag and extreme bloat to me. Its name is the highest form of irony.

I'm really not sure why JS frameworks in general are so popular (except to facilitate easy corporate turnover), when the browser already gives you a pretty complete toolset that's the easiest to use out of any GUI library in existence. It's not low level by any means.

Granted something like an <include html component> feature is desperately missing from the html spec, but there are lightweight solutions for it.

Someone needs to build Qt’s successor, probably with more beginner-friendly declarative semantics (akin to HCL or Cue) and probably with syntax closest to YAML or Python (based on learning curve, beginner readability etc).

The backend will probably have to be something written in Zig (likely) or Nim (capable, less likely) and will probably have to leverage OpenGL/Metal, WebGL and WASM.

Obviously a massive undertaking, which is why I think the industry has not reached consensus that this is what needs to happen. The less ideal options we have now often gets the job done.

Perhaps AI will help us by allowing us to swap to simpler and better solutions without the same level of pain and without necessarily having to hire experts in that new solution?

These bootstraps essentially speedrun software history, and so they tell us a lot about how we got here, and why we write the things we write. But they also create perfect game to weite greenfield alternative bootstraps. The shortest, most readable bootstrap, is proof of the best abstractions, the best way of doing things.

It's a chance to finally put the sort of software stack / tech tree stuff on a more apples-to-apples basis.

"we at Handmade community" - and no link to that community anywhere

blog itself? 2 posts a year, and 2025 posts aren't even on the blog itself (just redirects)

Yes, tooling and toolmaking should be promoted - but promotion itself should also be accessible somehow?

I don't see it happening for end user stuff like Reddit. The market seems to want the barely working thing for the most cheap in all consumer product categories.

And hiring someone desperate who has skimmed a React and Node JS tutorial page and is now fullstack something is cheap. Or at least the kind of cheap you can reach by greedily optimizing KPIs.

yeah this is pretty much 1. an incorrect implementation and/or 2. an incorrect take

and easily solvable with a bit of 'render auditing' / debugging

For example, take Dear.IMGUI which is a c++ UI framework with a kind of data binding, which generates vertex buffers which can be directly uploaded to the GPU and rendered.

It supports most of the fancy layout stuff of CSS afaik (flexbox etc), yet its almost as low level as it gets.

The code is also not that much harder to write than React.

But the "truck" that was "built from the frame" by Tesla was somehow worse. So his argument is frameworks built from the ground up will be ego projects that are big, ugly, shiny, and don't actually work

This is exactly what I'm trying to build. I'm writing a library on top of Qt that would make it easy to write native code as easy as it is writing React code! I would say it's even easier since we are throwing all the constraints of browsers and web apis out of the way.

And as a bonus if you control both slices of bread it's much easier to change the sandwich filling as well! (Though if the original sandwich-builder wasn't careful you might find some sticky residue left over on your bread… maybe someone should take this metaphor away before I do more damage.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmrBpxAtPrI

* These articles always say that hardware is amazing but software sucks. Let's not forget that hardware has its problems. Intel's management engine is a pile of complexity: https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op.... The x86_64 instruction set is hardly inspiring, and I imagine we lose a pile of performance because it fails to adequately represent the underlying hardware. (E.g. there are hundreds of registers on modern CPUs, but you can't access them directly and just have to hope the hardware does a good job of register allocation.)

* Languages unlock performance for the masses. Javascript will never be truly fast because it doesn't represent the machine. E.g. it doesn't have distinct integer and floating point types. Rust represents the machine and is fast, but is not as ergonomic as it could be. OxCaml is inspiring me lately as it's an ergonomic high-level language that also represents the machine. (Scala 3 is also getting there with capture checking, but that is still experimental.) If we want more performance we have to give a way to efficiently write code that can be turned into efficient code.