This looks cool. I know effectively nothing about Svelte so some of these questions may be coming from that ignorance....but can you talk more about the embedded V8 instance (what's it doing?) and also what gets sent across the wire? Is it the usual HTML and JS or is there any server-side rendering going on? How big is the binary for the HN demo? What's the story for static assets like video or images?
I've started using Go at work so definitely interested in using this for side-project web apps to keep me in the Go mindset.
Great questions. I answered some above, so I'll copy some and then answer your other questions below:
>> what's it doing?
Bud server-side renders Svelte files, then hydrates them on the client. This is similar to what most other JS frameworks do, it works like this:
1. Create two builds: one for server, one for browser. Both are built using ESBuild. In development, builds happen lazily upon request, similar to how a CDN like esm.sh would build JS to be imported. This will hopefully allow the build system to scale for larger apps. Vite was my inspiration here, but it's all done in Go.
2. V8 and the Svelte compiler are baked into the bud binary. When a request comes in, V8 evaluates the compiler running the server-built page and returns HTML. That's a mouthful, hopefully that makes sense.
>> what gets sent across the wire?
What gets sent over the wire is HTML. That HTML then has a script tag which requests the client-side version of the page that's used to hydrate the HTML and make the page interactive.
>> How big is the binary for the HN demo?
I just checked the binary size and it's 47.6 MB. It's mostly V8 right now, but will definitely get larger as you add more assets. I haven't tested it yet, but hopefully you'll be able to rsync just the diffs to a server.
>> What's the story for static assets like video or images
I've started using Go at work so definitely interested in using this for side-project web apps to keep me in the Go mindset.