2022.04.25 - RenderingNG deep-dive: BlinkNG

Title: 2022.04.25 – RenderingNG Deep Dive: BlinkNG

This Week’s Highlights

RenderingNG Deep Dive: BlinkNG https://developer.chrome.com/en/blog/blinkng/
Blink started as a fork of WebKit, which itself forked from KHTML back in 1998. It contains some of the oldest (and most critical) code in Chromium, and by 2014 it was clearly showing its age. That year we launched an ambitious set of projects under the banner BlinkNG, aimed at fixing long‑standing problems in the organization and structure of Blink’s codebase. This article explores BlinkNG and its component projects: why we did them, what they achieved, the guiding principles behind their design, and the future improvement opportunities they enable.

The Absurd Complexity of Server‑Side Rendering https://gist.github.com/Widdershin/98fd4f0e416e8eb2906d11fd1da62984
I don’t think SSR apps are fundamentally a bad idea. That said, the way we’re building them today is terrifyingly complex and error‑prone. If you’re considering one of these frameworks, weigh carefully whether the complexity is worth it, especially for less‑experienced team members. For those who do pursue SSR, I recommend investing in better static analysis to manage these problems. Rust has built a career by explicitly recognizing that lifetimes exist and that we need better tools to work with them. A similar opportunity exists here for SSR apps.

Digital = Physical https://medium.com/microsoft-design/digital-physical-4df9eceb63b2 https://wxcteam.microsoft.com/download/Microsoft-Green-Design-Principles.pdf
Green Design Principles that every designer can use to combat climate change. The principles were created by an amazing global group of people dedicated to advancing the art of designing for sustainable futures.

Yuque Document Editor Will Be Open‑Source: Starting With—but Not Limited to—Markdown https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/0WPwPhcvBlwOmPB9Z7zwGQ
Team lead Yan Wang revealed plans to open‑source the Yuque document editor’s code, hoping that an open‑collaboration model will make the editor better and stronger. Writing is a great habit for every developer—it helps us achieve lifelong learning, and a good documentation tool lets us turn what we learn and think into a knowledge base that benefits us forever. Also see: Is Open‑Source Really a Source of Fresh Water? (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/oku6uCvrb_YFkUIVhQm7l).

After Ten Years, Do You Really Understand Moments? http://www.geekpark.net/news/301104
Ten years have passed, and the “Moments” feature itself hasn’t changed much. Posting a Moment today feels essentially the same as it did a decade ago. Even the update frequency shows little change—only 15 Moments‑related updates in the WeChat changelog over ten years, the latest in 2018. Yet Moments has changed a lot in other ways. Ten years ago, checking on someone’s status meant a phone call; today many people’s first move is to glance at their Moments. Ten years ago, discussing a public issue meant gathering friends for a chat; now it’s often a simple repost. Even HR folks now consider scrolling through a candidate’s Moments a basic step in assessing personality. This week marks Moments’ tenth birthday, a good time to discuss what has changed, what hasn’t, and what the WeChat team might be thinking behind the scenes.

In‑Depth Reading

Node.js 18 New Features Explained https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/502951532
Node.js just released version 18.0.0, which includes built‑in fetch and node:test among other standard modules. One‑sentence take: the standard library is being standardized, the user library is being refined.

DanceNN: Overview of ByteDance’s Trillion‑Scale File‑Metadata Storage System https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/uJb6iplETFEaO2drL3YF_g
DanceNN is an internally developed directory‑tree metadata storage system that aims to satisfy the directory‑tree needs of all distributed storage systems (including but not limited to HDFS, NAS, etc.), dramatically simplifying the complex directory‑tree operations that upper‑level storage systems depend on—such as atomic rename and recursive delete. It addresses scalability, performance, and a globally unified namespace across heterogeneous systems for massive‑scale directory‑tree storage, creating a world‑leading generic distributed directory‑tree service. Currently, DanceNN provides metadata services for ByteDance’s online ByteNAS and offline HDFS distributed file systems.

4 Reasons to Avoid Using**npm link** https://hirok.io/posts/avoid-npm-link
The dangers of npm link and why you should use npx link instead.

10 Years of ‘Microservices’ https://microservices.io//post/microservices/2022/04/23/ten-years-of-microservices.html
This week marks the 10th anniversary of my first talk on microservice architecture. In April 2012 I was in Kyiv, Ukraine (see note below) as part of the Cloud Foundry Open Tour 2012 (Kyiv, Moscow, London). At the Kyiv event I presented “Decomposing Applications for Deployability and Scalability.”

Addressing the Last‑Mile Problem with MySQL High Availability https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2022/addressing-the-last-mile-problem-with-mysql-high-availability
MySQL is the primary database choice for LinkedIn applications that need a relational store. Managing a large fleet of databases brings many complexities; the MySQL SRE team at LinkedIn is responsible for maintaining 99.99 % uptime for internal customers. Over the years we have changed many operational practices to reduce Mean Time to Recover (MTTR).

How Retool Upgraded Our 4 TB Main Application PostgreSQL Database https://retool.com/blog/how-we-upgraded-postgresql-database/
Retool’s cloud‑hosted product runs on a single 4 TB PostgreSQL instance in Microsoft Azure. Last fall we migrated from PostgreSQL 9.6 to version 13 with minimal downtime. It wasn’t a straight line from A to B; in this post we share the story and tips for a similar upgrade.

Fresh Finds

Richard Stallman – “The State of the Free Software Movement” https://lunduke.substack.com/p/richard-stallman-the-state-of-the
The Free Software founder has pointed words for Ubuntu and Apple, and announces a manual for GNU C.

Node.js 18 is now available! Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno The Most Popular Node.js Frameworks in 2022 WebAssembly 2.0 is now a W3C First Public Working Draft New data: Do developers think Web3 will build a better internet? V8: Faster initialization of instances with new class features Web color is still broken: 7 years after “Computer Color is Broken,” the web is still getting color wrong. The Front‑End Developer’s Guide to the Terminal

PicMo: A Plain JavaScript Emoji Picker: Plain‑JavaScript emoji picker. Works with any app, any framework. Kaluma: A tiny JavaScript runtime for RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico) Mitosis: a compile‑time framework that lets you write components in JSX and compile to vanilla JavaScript, Angular, React, Vue, and more. Ember 4.3 Released, Ember’s Road to TypeScript and More Say hello to TinyMCE 6.0! WebDAV: A WebDAV Client Written in TypeScript

Go Developer Survey 2021 Results Memray: a memory profiler for Python. Celebrating 40 years of ZX Spectrum ❤️ 💛 💚 💙

Products & Others

Introducing arun.is 2.0 https://www.arun.is/blog/arun-is-2-0/
Today I’m announcing the most … (content truncated)

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Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on Web技术周刊 (Web Tech Weekly). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.