Would a rewrite be something nice ?

[loprima-l]

Hi everyone!

I was wondering if a frontend rewrite with a more modern tool like vue would be likeable.
I assume that elm was chosen for performance, but I don't think that frontend performance will be that bad on vue.
My take is that while on the backend looking for a 4ms performance tweak is useful. Frontend performance can be worse if it helps to get more feature done faster and a better UI.

I've had a look at #412, it's an effortless PR on Vue but looks complicated to me on ELM. But should significantly improve the user experience. And that's just one of many such issues.

So to summarise a bit I have 3 questions: Is it mandatory to use Elm? Would you like a rewrite in a language with a better DX and a lower learning curve? And if so, why?

Thank you very much !

[dasJ]

cc @garbas

[loprima-l]

@garbas Excuse me for the ping but I would love to hear your toughs on it !

[mweinelt]

Garbas left the marketing team and has become unavailable.

I think we have enough open issues to show that work is needed, and if a rewrite would improve the situation that would probably be welcome.

[Jaculabilis]

I do backend, not frontend, but I made an experimental foray into Vue to see how hard it would be to get something usable. In the vue branch under frontend-ng, I have the basic layout of the search reproduced. It still needs work to get search filters and query parameters working, and the styling could use a pass from someone with more area knowledge.

@raboof What do you think about the idea?

[raboof]

I personally prefer Elm to Vue tbh - not because of performance but because the compiler's guardrails are helpful.

[Jaculabilis]

I have it configured with TypeScript, so it does have some compiler-time checks. I don't know how they compare to Elm's, since I haven't been able to get VS Code's Elm extension to provide any intellisense yet.

I don't know how widespread Elm knowledge is compared to Vue or other frameworks, but it may be worth considering if only for the sake of making it easier to accept contributions.