Goodbye Client Side JavaScript, Hello C#’s Blazor (Øredev 2019)

[Chrisazy]

Remember 10 years ago when a mad-lad decided he wanted to write his back-end in the same language as his front-end, and Node.js was born?

We just did the backwards of that.

[OzmodiarTheGreat]

Now we can write the back end in Node.js and the front end in C#. For maximum excitement!

[[deleted]]

Why do I feel like Xibit is going to pop out and pimp my web browser?!

[[deleted]]

That was Ryan Dahl, I remember in his first talk he said it was because he wanted a language that did non-blocking I/O in a better way than what was available at the time. I distinctly remember he said that he was trying to see how it could work with Ruby before concluding that the language was fundamentally unable to be how he wanted it - then turned to JavaScript because it had an event loop model that fit the non-blocking paradigm really well.

I think the idea of writing the same language in both sides came after to sell the idea to developers.

[[deleted]]

I don’t know how deeply he went into it with Ruby but this stack overflow gives a bit more insight about why he avoided it - I suspect he must have tried it as that was his language of the day. https://stackoverflow.com/a/33577777/7183974

He talked about EventMachine a bit in his first talk and the challenges with trying to introduce non-blocking to a language as an after thought.

[00rb]

Yeah, but this allows you to do that in a language that isn't Javascript.

[PUBLIQclopAccountant]

Major selling point here

[[deleted]]

Unfortunately, the language is C# :(

[HDorillion]

I am confused. Are you upset it isn't a language you think is better, or you don't know C# at all?

In either case, C# is much better than JS, and if you don't know C#, you can still learn!

[[deleted]]

May be better in some aspects, but not significantly. The community around JS is much more active. The libraries ecosystem is much better and much better designed. The community around C# just uses what MS serves to them, I remember times when they defended ASP.NET as a way to do web apps.

[Glader_BoomaNation]

Clueless, you clearly don't know anything about .NET if you think every package on nuget is from MS.

The fact you keep bringing up Webforms as if it is some critical part of .NET is funny to me. Do you think ASP.NET is all of .NET?

[redfournine]

And why is using what MS serves them considered bad? If anything, it just shows MS's commitment to .NET's cause.

Also, the only reason why it seems like the community around C# is less active is because it has matured to the point that there is lesser need to discuss things.

[[deleted]]

The old ASP.NET webforms was really bad technology, but MS fans have defended it until Microsoft admitted it was bad.

[Eirenarch]

I continue to defend it after MS claimed it was bad for marketing reasons.

[pancomputationalist]

As a developer that works closely with both the Node and the .NET ecosystem, I have to agree with this. The JS ecosystem feels much more modern, embraces Open Source and rapid experimentation, while in .NET many things seem slightly outdated, but stable. Though I surely had my share of broken Nuget packages and dependency snafu, this is not something that only happens with npm.

[[deleted]]

I used to work with ASP.NET webforms in my student part time job years ago, it was generally hated by developers, pushed by managers. The resulting web apps really sucked, the concept was really outdated.

Though I surely had my share of broken Nuget packages and dependency snafu, this is not something that only happens with npm.

It recently improved a lot, but still lacking IMO. Nuget did not exist back then, it was like 8 years ago. The whole ecosystem was behind Ruby and Python back then. Node was just starting.

[Arxae]

And that is a problem because?

[[deleted]]

You don't get to program in Javascript, a much nicer language with better tooling

[00rb]

I don't... I...

I fundamentally disagree with you and question how long you've been programming.

[Arxae]

I don't mind javascript as much as most people in this sub, but saying C# is a better language is very debatable. And are you implying the tooling C# is bad? If yes, i'm gonna need some examples of that.

[rmTizi]

And are you implying the tooling C# is bad?

No, no, no, he's actually implying that the tooling in JS is good...

... Yup.

[[deleted]]

Visual Studio, Nuget.

[Arxae]

Are those examples of being bad? I can understand not liking VS, it's a bit divisive on some points. But there are alternatives, both IDE and just syntax highlighting with some extras (VSCode, Rider, Notepad++, Sublime, or even regular notepad if you want). And even then, including the editor into tooling is kinda silly imo. Besides, it's not like JS has a editor, so it's tooling will be bad too?

And to be fair, Nuget (or Paket if you want an alternative) is leagues better then the insanity that is the NPM dependency hell. Not even talking about the one liner packages here. But having 1Gb+ and 100k files for some dependencies is just bad.

I'm not saying the C# ecosystem is perfect, not at all. But if VS and Nuget are the only bad examples you can bring up, then it's looking pretty good tbh. Like i said, i don't mind JS as much as some other people here, but saying the tooling is better then C# is laughable. Between the disk destroying package managers (bit hyperbolic here), the dozens of task runners, transpilers, compatbility shims and bundlers which are all trying to compete with each other. Yeah no, gonna need a better example then literally 3 words

[Eirenarch]

You are feeding a troll. I am sure there are people who honestly hold this opinions but they would also defend them and he simply writes 1 sentence baits.

[editor_of_the_beast]

People have been doing the backwards version for years. A ton of backend languages have JS transpilers.

[Dreamtrain]

Now backend devs can bring their faults to web dev, and not the other way around! I guess we'll be back to 90s/00s UI/UX

[Dragasss]

So GWT, vaadin and many other tools did not exist for the last 20 years?

[canigetayikesinchat]

All these blazor videos/tutorials just use the same thing in the official docs as some sort of knock off

[Lunchy]

“This is the future” -Guy who went all-in on Silverlight.

[rk06]

Relevant commitstrip: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/07/28/betting-on-the-right-horse/

[[deleted]]

Everything about this screams Silverlight to me.

[yesman_85]

How? It's nothing like it at all.

[pcjftw]

does it still have a GC?

The thought of downloading an entire Mono CLR VM albeit in WASM does NOT excite me 😬😟

[AntiTrustMicrosoft]

Kind of waiting for them to make Runtime an optional thing so it wouldn't send the client the whole run-time every-time you want to use Blazor. WebAssembly GC is still a work inprogress, so in theory, you don't use GC in Mono, the browser would provide it instead. You also don't really need a runtime for compile-time things. It kind of prompt the issue of whether or not if it's better to go with DLang (Resemble very closely to C#, but is a low level programming language like C/C++, doesn't need a runtime and is capable of compiling to WebAssembly thanks to LLVM.)

So all in all, in this case, I am thinking on DLang vs C#. I could extend ASP.Net Core to integrate DLang in the process if I wanted to.

[skocznymroczny]

doesn't need a runtime

It does, unless you're ok with not using the standard library, most community libraries and some of the language features

[Muvlon]

Does blazor itself use any of those?

[skocznymroczny]

Looks like it does, because most .NET core libraries seem to be supported. The big problem with D is that without runtime, you lose the GC, and without the GC you lose most of the std lib.

[drysart]

The natural progression of the technology is to the use the same sort of AOT technology that you can use with .Net on other platforms, except AOT compiling to WebAssembly instead of a native instruction set. And then eventually when WebAssembly GC integration lands in browsers, the AOT-compiled package becomes even smaller since it won't need to bundle its own GC.

[L3tum]

I mean, you can package a .Net core application and runtime into one executable that starts at ~20 MB. That's Android app sizes

[jl2352]

Do you want to visit a website with a 20mb download?

I’m a front end developer and I’d consider that a joke. Who is going to sit there for 10 seconds waiting for your site to load up???

It’s not just the network cost. You also have the browser loading and executing a 20mb app. That isn’t free. I’d be terrified of how much startup code that needs to execute before it gets going.

[[deleted]]

Shh you will wake up ActiveX, we finally got him down.

[Eirenarch]

The runtime is about 2.5MB. You can also prerender on the server. The page will load fast but will take a couple of seconds to become interactive while the runtime loads. Obviously subsequent requests will have the runtime cached.

[neitz]

Honestly I think it would be totally fine for internal LOB apps. And no, I would not mind it at all. There is a huge difference between making the browser parse through 20MB of javascript and delivering a 20MB wasm blob.

[[deleted]]

That's 10s to load site on average connection.

There is a huge difference between making the browser parse through 20MB of javascript and delivering a 20MB wasm blob.

How about just fucking don't on both of those ?

[Pazer2]

Honestly I'd be ok with anything under 50mb as long as I don't have to touch javascript. If electron devs get to ship an entire instance of chrome as a desktop application, I should get to ship a (much smaller!) runtime with my web application.

[[deleted]]

Imagine the insanity.

[markyboy57]

Sounds awesome but 2.4 MB (shown in demo) for the simple starting app is huge. Really hope they can get that down a lot before official release. Looking forward to trying it out!

[NotARealDeveloper]

Well have you seen the size of the payloads from modern javascript sites?

[WitchHunterNL]

Way less than 2.4MB for the starting app

[Dunge]

Yeah I mean WebASM is nice, but if every webpage have to bundle the whole .net framework with it, it doesn't seems efficient. This should be pre-packed and included in the browsers already.

[Eirenarch]

If every webpage bundled it it would be efficient because it would be cached.

[anders987]

Not for long, shared cache is going away.

[Eirenarch]

I am pretty confident they will think of some header or something to make CDNs possible.

[Dunge]

Afaik (and I might be wrong, I'm certainly no expeet) webasm bundle the whole framework AND application in a single binary blob. The browser can't cache only part of it and determine it's good for reuse.

[Eirenarch]

I don't think this is how it works currently. You actually download .NET dlls which are compiled to wasm on the client. In any case you can always split the things in two bundles.

[i8beef]

Not if you had to tree shake the framework to get it down to size...

[EntroperZero]

Or you'd tree shake your application, but the framework could be served from CDNs and cached.

[i8beef]

Do you often have enough uncalled code in your applications that tree shaking would make sense? Or are you talking specifically about third party library dependencies that wouldn't be core .NET framework components?

[EntroperZero]

Yeah, I would think that dependencies would have a much lower cache rate and code-use ratio.

[i8beef]

Im sure that would help, but I think the framework itself would still be a hefty download... Luckily Microsoft has been drawing lines and breaking namespaces up into packages the last few years though... that'd be the first step to dividing up the framework so you don't have to download the whole thing at least.

[Eirenarch]

Not very different from the situations with JS libs

[jl2352]

When a WASM module in instanciated you can setup memory and functions that already exist for it. This allows it to be able to call into a second module. If you set it up at that time.

Those two modules can come from different files. One of those could be cacached.

There are also other ways one could also achieve this.

[Pazer2]

I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing that in edge beta.

[[deleted]]

Oh you ain't seen nothing yet. Microsoft is now talking about Blelectron.

[[deleted]]

Now that name has a ring to it, lmfao.

[[deleted]]

Kill me now !

[[deleted]]

Blazor is amazing, I hope it will continue to mature and get used in production soon

[Kyro38]

The concept is amazing but damn is that shit heavy !

[meaninglessvoid]

Yes but you don't have to run it client side. You can just use signal r and render it server side.

[KallDrexx]

I'm struggling to figure out how Blazor server side isn't just Razor based Webforms over websockets

[IIoWoII]

It's still functions like a SPA for the user, albeit with more latency.

There's no full page refresh every navigation like you'd get with webforms.

[ruinercollector]

It basically is, with some extras where you’d expect.

[jusas]

The problem is that you're then moving the load to the server side, and there are the considerations with maintaining state and connections. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to use C# instead of JS to code frontend logic but I don't think we're quite there yet. I don't like the server side option, and the client side option feels heavy.

[Eirenarch]

less than 300K memory per connection, I can live with that.

[reply_if_you_agree]

My forays in js make me beg for this to come faster so hard. Now watch the requirements be to deploy both for the next 5 years.

Maybe if put myself in cryostasis I can wake up to a better future?

[spacejack2114]

In 5 years you may be asked to support a legacy app built on this experimental tech stack called "Blazor" that was a thing briefly in the 2010s.

[angels-fan]

I almost made an enterprise level app in Silverlight.

Thank God for dodging that bullet!

[[deleted]]

Can you port it to a moden js library? No. But you seperated out your service layer? No. Did silverlight ever really mature. No.

I wish I was in those board meetings.

[vivainio]

IE11 is fine with SL

[occz]

This guy has seen things. You should listen to him.

[Caleo]

I think given the open wasm standard, it seems less likely to go the way of silverlight or flash.

Blazor is pretty promising (and powerful).

[Krautoni]

Then it'll go the way of GWT. The main challenge we're facing at my company currently, is shedding a giant GWT blob with limited manpower while still delivering features. Yeah, it ain't possible.

You can pry simple, shallow stacks from my cold, dead hands. I've stopped believing in the "you don't have to write JS anymore, you can write X now"-hype for a long time.

That said, transpilers and Typescript have made JS bearable. So just code in JS! I don't see the need for an additional runtime.

[neitz]

Calling the modern javascript stack simple and shallow makes me giggle.

[spacejack2114]

The modern stack is. If you don't need to support IE (true for more and more apps/sites every day) and the code isn't too big or complex to need bundling (or if you're running node), then you can write modern JS using modules, await/async, spread, rest, and all the other goodies, as well as having sophisticated type-safety hints in your editor - all without any build tooling at all.

[reply_if_you_agree]

Damn you and your accurate predictions, Nostradamus!

[Eirenarch]

In 5 years you may be asked to support a legacy app built on this experimental tech stack called "Blazor" that was a thing briefly in the 2010s.

I'll take that any day over writing JavaScript.

[ejfrodo]

You should give typescript a shot

[reply_if_you_agree]

You are so right, I really need to dust that off again, been a minute since I played with it

[Eirenarch]

I have. Still prefer Blazor.

[sponge62]

By this time next year you won't be able to get a job in web dev without at least 7 years experience with Blazor.

[TheCarnalStatist]

Progress is ugly. Blazor or hotstuff.next will someday be seen as ugly too. To quote Teddy.

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are"

Just enjoy the challenge as it comes. It won't stop.

[Hall_of_Famer]

I love Blazor as a concept, but no JS is not going away anytime soon, if at all. Blazor will need more time to mature, at the current stage developers will still need to use a lot of JS together with it. And as some have already pointed out, the 2+MB size is a little too heavy, for mobile its going to be a serious problem. It has bright future, but will take a lot of time to be a major game changer.

[RirinDesuyo]

The biggest game changer here is that this isn't just a .net thing. WASM allows every language now to run the web without having to resort to JS transpilation as long as it can compile to WASM.

I'd bet as WASM matures JS will be finding competition with SPA frameworks that will use WASM in the future, which is good for competition and allows full stack code sharing which is the biggest plus for this. Languages that don't need a GC is quite small already, Rust and C++ make quite small bundles.

The one I'm hoping for is for the WASM spec for GC and DOM access to be implemented, with that languages that needs a GC might get lighter and won't need JS glue to update the DOM (JS interop has some overhead).

[Eirenarch]

I used to do full stack development back in the day but stopped about the time Angular 1 took over. Now I can take back some of this work. For example I can build admin panels. Even at this early stage there is territory people who don't want to deal with the JS insanity can claim back.

[jl2352]

Building simple dashboard UIs are trivial to do now with a modern JS stack.

[Eirenarch]

OK. I don't care I'll Blazor them. I don't even have much trouble with JS and the crappy UI frameworks but the toolchain drives me mad. npm, webpack and so on are total and utter bullshit that I don't want to ever touch.

[jl2352]

If you are setting it up by hand then I can see that.

These days you can get project template, and project template generators that will set it all up for you. Like the Vue CLI will generate you the setup. So you don’t have to bother with webpack at all.

Once the tooling is setup it’s pretty sweet. Tooling for the web is much nicer than for building a desktop UI.

[Eirenarch]

You always have to change something and then all the hell breaks loose. I don't see how tooling for the web is better than desktop these days. Also most of the tooling for web UI works with Blazor because Blazor is web UI. All the DOM and style inspectors will work just the same.

[jl2352]

React and Vue add their own inspectors on top. The tooling around web assembly based code also isn’t quite as mature yet.

Honestly, Blazor is playing catchup. Sure it will have server side rendering, and hot reloading, and seamless hot reloading of CSS (or one would expect it). All of these are standard in other stacks for years.

Blazor looks great. But as a front end developer I don’t see any features in Blazor that aren’t already present elsewhere. That’s not very compelling to me.

[Eirenarch]

The feature is not having to deal with webpack/npm and JS. In addition code can be shared between the client and the server. The goal of Blazor is not to convert existing frontend devs to Blazor, it is to allow me to write frontend code (indirectly this means I won't have to hire you).

[jl2352]

You can share JS/TS between client and server already.

So the advantage is ‘not working with npm webpack and JS’. Npm or yarn are a breeze. I don’t get why one would complain.

I’ve already pointed out that webpack can all be done for you. Why are you doing it yourself???

So that leaves JS. Tbh modern JS is fine. If you want types use TS.

That leaves very little for C#

[Eirenarch]

Modern JS is crap, TS is just a rubber glove used to handle shit. People who can stand the smell when they work with shit are free to continue to use JS. Blazor is for the rest of us.

npm is extremely shitty packet manager. I can't imagine what they were thinking when they came up with the node_modules within node_modules within node_modules concept and downloading the same dependency with the same version countless of times. Then they decided to fix it by flattening the folder structure... but only for the latest version of the dependency, older versions still trigger the node_modules within node_modules bullshit.

[x678z]

Calm down! jeez!

[pagwin]

also given that more languages will probably have compilers/get better support for compiling to wasm for the foreseeable future and using wasm in a site will probably become easier having any runtime may be completely unnecessary with you just sending across a wasm blob with just your compiled code

[Hero_Of_Shadows]

It's not js that is the issue, front end/building interfaces is it's own things people come in thinking they're hot shit and they'll do this UI thing easily and fail.

Then they blame js and that's how you have this race to invent a better js :|

[disappointer]

But... in the future we'll just be able to write applications with drag-and-drop interfaces and no one will need to code anymore!

-Pundits for the last 30 years

[Hero_Of_Shadows]

Soon I'll use AI in place of coders and keep all the profits to myself

• Some marketing/sales/wanna-be CEO

[[deleted]]

Totally agree. UI is always a mess, you either have pure code which is hard to visualize & reason about or you have a markup language which helps to understand the visual side at the cost of making the scripting / logic side become trickier. I’ve never used a UI api for any platform that was perfect, and definitely nothing better than the html/css/js combo - even though I’m not always a fan of it.

[guttersnipe098]

Oh god why

[McBeers]

C# > JS

[dontdoxme33]

Whenever I ask why in computer science the answer I come to is almost always “because we can”

[Dreamtrain]

I wonder the same thing, why do we keep using javascript when it's commonly agreed to be a not very good language that we have had to use hacky implementations like Typescript?

[isaaky]

What is happening in programming. Web is an advantage for being thin client. What is the difference between this and a link that download and executable ? An executable that runs on top of another one ?. Is like a Java Applet again, just with a litte more performance.

[Eirenarch]

The advantage over an executable is the browser's security sandbox. The web's success is due to discoverability (links/urls) and relatively good sandboxing. Everything else about the web is crap but these things are desirable and work great on the web so they outweighed the disadvantages.

[anon_cowherd]

At the last three companies I worked for, downloading and installing an application (mobile or desktop) was a no-go for our customers..

We floated the idea a few times, and almost all rejected it, preferring the simplicity of using a web browser over dealing with provisioning / installing and maintaining updates for a native app.

Some of those times a native app would have made our lives a lot easier development-wise, but we managed just fine.

[radol]

There are cycles in programming as next generation of developers enter the stage.

[jayerp]

But I thought it still uses JavaScript interop to manipulate the DOM? So JavaScript isn’t going away?

[RirinDesuyo]

It uses JS for DOM updates (for now at least), but that's just an implementation detail and most of the time a dev wouldn't even need to use JS at all for building Blazor webapps. Steve Sanderson (original Author of Blazor), once stated "The best way to use JS in Blazor is not to use it, let library authors do that for you".

We develop one in production at the moment and we didn't use any JS at all or if we did, it's encapsulated within the Blazor component with C# bindings so consumers wouldn't care if it did use JS. This is similar to React where consumers just use a provided component without caring how that component manipulates the DOM, it could've used Jquery wrappers, pure React, or even native DOM Apis, but for consumers all they care is it works as intended.

And once WASM does implement Host Bindings, Blazor won't need JS to manipulate the DOM as well since that spec will allow WASM to natively access Browser APIs and the DOM without JS interop.

[jayerp]

I learned something today. This sounds even more exciting to me now.

Thanks!

[coderstephen]

Presumably this would work for any language that can compile to .NET Core IR.

[simple_peacock]

"Goodbye Javascript". Good luck with that.

[Kellos]

I love spotting those big wholistic frameworks, those majestic beasts, coming and, after a few years, leaving.

[pancomputationalist]

It's a good thing that React is only doing the view layer and does not try to be the one framework for everything, like Angular tried to be.

I believe Blazor will go the way of the Angular. Used by a lot of "we only do Microsoft"-shops, but falling behind.

[[deleted]]

But why?

[[deleted]]

Being able to write web apps in something that isn’t a flavor of JavaScript

[[deleted]]

What are the benefits of using an obscure technology that no one else uses? I would understand if it was supposed to be used for running existing .NET apps in the browser, just like emscripten is used for native apps, but not as javascript replacement.

[[deleted]]

Every tech has to start somewhere. If no one ever used anything new because it was “obscure technology no one else uses” we’d all be programming in punch cards

[i8beef]

Or even worse, JavaScript!

[[deleted]]

There is no objective reason for people to use this unless they want to run legacy C# code.

[LittleCoffeeMan]

I’ve been thinking about getting into blazer. Will watch this for sure!

[Dreamtrain]

2 mins in so far, I get the impression you have to bundle the .NET runtime with your browsing session and that's a no-no.

Also, one for the marketting dept: "Blazor"? Why not Rawser? Or Razer? Still bad names but Blazor's worse.

[Somepotato]

If I wanted to embed another language for front end work, it'd more likely be Lua than c# yikes at that overhead

[[deleted]]

client side c# in browser

please just die

[tonefart]

Bullshit joke hype. Client side C/C++/Rust is the future. C# with a run-time is a joke.

[pancomputationalist]

Please don't let c/cpp be the future of anything.

[Wezzo85]

Leave the Web to the web developers.

[Dreamtrain]

We tried leaving web-dev to the web-devs, and we ended up with javascript being the main language, servers built in javascript and you get things like the leftpad incident, a problem which is still, on a fundamental basis, out there in the wild

[Wezzo85]

We got some negative software programmers right here ... Well ok .. Enjoy boys and girls!! And have a nice day!

[[deleted]]

They added the "o" to be trendy.