01-introduction.md

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Precompiler Overview
3. Runtime Overview
4. References
5. Validators
6. Runtime Compiler
7. Initial Render
8. Rerendering (Updating)
9. The Environment
10. Optimizations

Introduction

Glimmer is a flexible, low-level rendering pipeline for building a "live" DOM from Handlebars templates that can subsequently be updated cheaply when data changes.

In addition to the basic Handlebars features such as helpers and partials, Glimmer also comes with built-in support for a very flexible and powerful primitive called "Components" and a set of low-level hooks which the host environment can use to build other high-level, user-facing features.

This document will give you an overview of Glimmer's core architecture. While this guide is fairly detailed, this is not intended to be an always up-to-date API documentation or getting started guide. When code examples are given in this document, you should generally treat them as simplified pseudo-code that help illustrate the design rather than describing the precise implementation details in the current codebase.

The code examples in this document are written in TypeScript.

---

Next: Precompiler Overview »