Off The Main Thread

Oct 29 2024 13 ep. 52 mins 94
Off The Main Thread Podcast artwork

Surma and Jake talk about whatever's going on in the world of tech & web development.

  Technology
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More build tools: Nix

Oct 29 2024 41 mins  
After talking about Bazel in one of our previous episodes, we are now looking at Nix, a build system that has been getting increasing attention lately. Resources: OTMT Bazel episode Surma's video on Nix Eelco Dolstra's PhD Thesis Nix & NixOS A branch of Squoosh using Nix Nixpkgs manual Comparison of size and freshness of different package managers Home Manager Nix pills

The new stylable select element

Oct 08 2024 45 mins  
We're finally getting a element we can fully control with CSS! A bunch of other stuff needed to be added to the platform to make it work, and the good news is we can use it a lot of them independently of . Resources: Chrome's article on the new , and how you can provide feedback. The CSS appearance property. Nope, I still don't know what it does. The Popover API. "On popover acc

Chrome's new LLM AI API OMG

Aug 30 2024 38 mins  
Chrome is experimenting with exposing an LLM to the web platform. Jake and Surma dig into how the API works, and whether something like this could work on the open web. Resources: The explainer ChatGPT functions Chrome's initial vague docs about the feature Gemini terms of use The EURion constellation WebNN

Chrome’s secretly installed extensions

Aug 06 2024 29 mins  
Luca found a hidden Chrome extension that is installed by default in Chrome and most Chromium derivatives. Surma and Jake dig into what this extensions does and how reasonable it is to get angry about it. Resources: Luca’s original tweet thread The extension’s source code Discussion on blink-dev The original PR that introduced the extension Brendan Eich’s response Brave PR

Are web components worth it?

Jun 12 2024 43 mins  
In this episode, Jake and Surma chat about web components. Why they were invented, what they're useful for, and how they would improve. Resources: Surma showers his eyeball. The old custom elements 'v0' spec. The old shadow DOM 'v0' spec. The old HTML imports spec. The initial version of Polymer. Lit (formally lit-html). HTML attributes vs DOM properties. Issue looking at ways cu

Why Source Maps don’t always work

Jun 03 2024 42 mins  
In this episode, Surma shares with Jake all the things he learned reading up on source maps and DWARF. Resources: Jake's Jericho triangle source-map-explorer Hacker News comment by Joseph Shorr on the origins of source maps The Source Map "specification" EvanW's source map visualizer Wikipedia: VLQ DWARF specification llvm-dwarfdump gimli addr2line bundlephobia Wasmphobia WebAsse

Putting React In The Browser

Apr 22 2024 44 mins  
In this episode, Jake and Surma chat about the complexities of adding common framework patterns into the web platform, and work that has been done on that so far. Resources: Michael Jackson's tweet. Is WebAssembly magic performance pixie dust? - Surma's investigation into wasm performance. defaultValue reflects the value attribute. The value property is complicated. HTML templa

Canvas-based Web Apps

Mar 25 2024 46 mins  
In this episode, Surma talks about web apps that (partly) abandon the DOM and use canvas instead, to take rendering matters into their own hands. Figma is one popular app that uses this approach, while Flutter is an entire app platform that went with this technique to provide portability. Jake and Surma discuss the tradeoffs of building apps this way. Resources: AI text-to-speech

The Apple PWA Ban

Mar 01 2024 51 mins  
In this episode, Jake chats about the latest EU ruling that requires Apple to allow other browser engines on iOS, and how Apple is reacting to it. Resources: Microsoft vs the EU Microsoft vs the US BrowserChoice.eu IBrowse Mobile operating system market share Web platform tests dashboard The internal Apple email about HTML5 The Open Web Advocacy group The EU digital markets act S

TC39 Roundup and Bevy’s ECS

Jan 24 2024 80 mins  
In this episode, Surma shares what he learned while getting started with the Bevy Game engine, Entity Component Systems and why they might be useful for the Web. Jake rounds up the newest JavaScript language features that landed in TC39’s Stage 3. Resources: Bevy Game Engine Bevy Rendering Pipeline Buffer-backed Objects, a library by Surma to store objects in ArrayBuffer Surma b