C++ for production web development?

[rygo6]

I found this after much googling for the possibility of making a website entirely with C++ and webassembly. So far it's quite impressive, everything I have seen so far I would have done the same way. I am trying understand it a bit more. I am really interested in pushing to create a full C++ tooling to do production web apps, hopefully being a complete alternative to react and node.

This project seems to be the only thing I've seen so far that has taken seemingly a correct step in that direction. So I am curious to almost like brainstorm on this. Where do you see asm-dom going? Are you hopeful for comprehensive C++ web tooling? Is such a thing plausible or ideal? What missing components do you think are necessary?

[mbasso]

Hi @rygo6,
first of all thank you for the compliments and for your interest in this project! I really appreciate it! 😄
Regarding asm-dom, I'm thinking to implement something like snabbdom's thunks and other simple features like that. I'd like to maintain it simple and performant.

Where do you see asm-dom going? Are you hopeful for comprehensive C++ web tooling? Is such a thing plausible or ideal? What missing components do you think are necessary?

asm-dom is a minimal virtual dom that can be easily used to build a framework, just like snabbdom. It would be interesting to develop something similar to react, class components with lifecycle and so on. Here is a simple example of that.
I think that we can use it to build something bigger but I'd like to leave this package simple and reusable without transforming it into a framework. I don't want to force people to use a big framework if they don't want, we can just fork or import it as a dependency.
We certainly need other helper packages that call JS when needed to hide to the user complex mechanisms like routing etc. I think that we can develop modular code in this way and then aggregate them to build a framework.
A lot of work needs to be done but I'm really hopeful.
What do you think about it? Do you think that this is the right way to do that?

[talentlessguy]

@mbasso, I like this project too! Very upset this isn't in GitHub trending :(

About "complex mechanisms". You can just create a lot of plugins for asm-dom and we will be able to use them like usual c++ libraries.

Some example names

asm-dom-plugin-component
asm-dom-plugin-state

And so on.

And we will be able to use it like this:

#include <asm-dom-plugin-state>

[rygo6]

Sorry for not responding to this for so long. Went on a bit of detour in my personal life and projects. But started looking at this again.

I agree with the approach of keeping this repo as simple as possible. How do you think we would deal with pulling together all the different modular pieces of a large project? Could we rely on NPM for modular pieces? Can you distribute C++ through NPM?

I read through some more of your cpp code, and also some of snabdom. I realize I am actually kind of naive on all the thinking behind the design of a virtual dom. I was curious, did you by chance base this implementation off of a description of virtual dom in a book, or article, somewhere which I could also read to get a better understanding of the thinking behind it?

[webern]

asm-dom is a minimal virtual dom that can be easily used to build a framework, just like snabbdom. It would be interesting to develop something similar to react, class components with lifecycle and so on. Here is a simple example of that.

Do you think most of the foundation is available such that a framework (like React) could be written in C++? Or is there more JavaScript integration that's needed?

[mbasso]

@rygo6

Sorry for not responding to this for so long. Went on a bit of detour in my personal life and projects. But started looking at this again.

Don't worry 😄 We all have our personal life

I agree with the approach of keeping this repo as simple as possible. How do you think we would deal with pulling together all the different modular pieces of a large project? Could we rely on NPM for modular pieces? Can you distribute C++ through NPM?

At the moment asm-dom needs both C++ and JS imports to work properly... I'm planning to remove the last ones in order to improve the public API and have only C++ files. However, at the moment I'm not able to identify the right package manager, indeed, I'm not sure about the decision to use NPM...
Have you some suggestions to distribute modules in a convenient way?

I read through some more of your cpp code, and also some of snabdom. I realize I am actually kind of naive on all the thinking behind the design of a virtual dom. I was curious, did you by chance base this implementation off of a description of virtual dom in a book, or article, somewhere which I could also read to get a better understanding of the thinking behind it?

I based the implementation of asm-dom on snabbdom simply reading thorugh the source code... I've also read the implementation of preact, which is a really performant virtual dom with the same APIs of React, and inferno that is also interesting too. preact uses a DOM recycler and inferno uses bitwise operations to speed up the critical path, as asm-dom does.
I've read also some articles and watched some videos, for example:

• https://medium.com/@asolove/preact-internals-1-the-easy-parts-3a081fa36205
• https://medium.com/@asolove/preact-internals-2-the-component-model-36a05e32957b
• https://medium.com/@asolove/preact-internals-3-some-fiddly-little-bits-f353b1ad7abc
• https://youtu.be/LY6y3HbDVmg

@webern

Do you think most of the foundation is available such that a framework (like React) could be written in C++? Or is there more JavaScript integration that's needed?

I'm not an expert of the internals of React but I know that the core module and the one to interact with the DOM are well separated. The second is just a renderer of the first one that I think it could be easily written in C++. We should try to confirm it but I suppose it's possible.

[rygo6]

In terms of managing modules, I personally never saw what was so terrible with git modules. The only big issue I see is that it doesn't automatically clone all dependencies for a module. But honestly thats one of the things I kind of hate about npm, you add a module to draw a bar graph, then it adds 50 more modules to node_modules. Maybe manually having to git submodule add each depdency would make people conciencious of what their dependencies are.

But maybe it could warrant an expansion to git? Perhaps 'Git Dependencies". A repo would have have an extra .gitdepedencies file that would list all the dependencies for the repo. Once it clones a repo from .gitdependencies, it would check for .gitdependencies in that repo and do the same. But it would clone all repos in .gitdependencies under a single folder in the root, in a single "dependencies" directory that would be akin to node_modules.

[rygo6]

On the subject of my last post. have you guys seen this?
https://nxxm.github.io/

Looks to be the exactly perfectly alternative to npm that would work well for something like this.

[rygo6]

Some more reading, this seems more popular:
https://conan.io
Im thinking I am going to try to get this set up with Conan.

[mbasso]

Some more reading, this seems more popular:
https://conan.io
Im thinking I am going to try to get this set up with Conan.

Cool, sounds good.
Keep me updated if you experiment something with it 😄
We can publish it on both npm and conan for now. In a project with a lot of js interaction npm is certainly needed, the same conan but for C++...

At the moment I'm modifying a little bit the internals of asm-dom (and a few public api, but something really small) in order to continue with the multithreading smoothly... I'll open a "Work in progress" PR one of these days.