Not my blog, but the author’s experience reminded me of my own frustrations with Microsoft GitHub.
The only issue they mention is browser page text search not working on rendered file view (blame).
The feels legacy conclusion doesn’t make any sense to me.
GitHub is not the only platform implementing virtual scrolling, partial rendering of rendered files. There’s a reason they do that: Files can get big, and adding various code highlighting and interactivity costs performance. It’s not a local code representation and rendered canvas. It’s rendered into a DOM and DOM representation, with markup and attached logic. Which at some point quickly becomes very inefficient or costly.
Not being able to use the browser text search is an unfortunate side effect.
I consider it a worsening modernization/feature addition. That’s the opposite of legacy. We’re moving forward (in a bad way), not stagnating.
When I click Blame, and then press Ctrl+F, it opens not my browser text search but the in-page in-file search. It works for me. (Not that I always use that search or like it.)
There’s a reason they do that: Files can get big
Oh, boy. Wouldn’t it be great if servers had a way to discover the size of the files on their storage without having to read them?
adding various code highlighting and interactivity costs performance
Somebody, quick, there’s work to be done on language theory so that we learn how to do those things with a cost just proportional to the file size!
(No way! Who is that Chomsky guy you keep telling me about?)
Dude, his point is that if you did not implement partial rendering on a big file, the browser will have to work extra hard to render that shit. Not to mention if you add any interactivity on the client side like variable highlighting that needs to be context aware for each language… that basically turns your browser into VSCode, at that point just launch the browser based vscode using the . shortcut.
It’s not a matter of the server side of things but rather on the client side of things.
