In practice, the only thing that makes web experiences good is caring about the user experience — specifically, the experience of folks at the margins. Technologies come and go, but what always makes the difference is giving a toss about the user.

React dot JS, or simply “reaked”, is a not inconsiderable amount of JavaScript, written by some self-styled engineers, to help a website called Facebook undermine democracy, foment genocide, and do whatever else is needed to sell virtual advertising space…

React is useful for making complex interfaces like Facebook’s or for making otherwise simple interfaces, and their underlying codebases, complex like Facebook’s. Rendering the text “hello world” without React requires one text editor and exactly 11 bytes of code. Doing the same with React, via the popular “create-react-app” command line interface, requires over 200MB of Node modules. The continual maintenance and expert calibration needed to run a React application has created a thriving job market.

For years now, though, I’ve been using Tachometer for most browser-based benchmarks. It’s featured in this blog a few times, although I’ve never written specifically about it. Tachometer doesn’t make benchmarking totally foolproof, but it does automate a lot of the trickiest bits. What I like best is that it:

So you have a demo in JS. It’s pretty. It’s perfect. It’s 3k in a 1k competition. Well, damn.You start with the obvious and run it through a minifier and you shorten all your variable names to a single character, you get it to 2500 bytes. Great, that’s progress, but you’ve still got 1476 bytes to go. You merge some functions together, fold a couple loops into each other, and soon you’re at 2200 bytes. Long way to go.Rule