Episode Details

So last time we chatted well two times ago talked about my dom diffing woes. Why dom diffing matters in Livewire why it's not perfect why it's super frustrating. Well, I have good news. We're through the woods a little bit and I feel a lot better about where where I'm at with the whole situation in Livewire.

So I want to talk about how I got there. Where to begin so I had mentioned that there's a fork in the road right now. I'm using a package called morph Dom. It's the same package that Phoenix live view uses for Dom diffing and it works. Okay out of the box. I had to do some tweaking I found some bugs right away, but I've encountered a few nebulous bugs that just kind of reveal that morphdom isn't the most advanced Dom differ.

Maybe another way of putting this it I guess the more specific way of putting this it doesn't it doesn't look ahead. So it does Dom diffing but it doesn't predict the future like other Dom differs do and they can basically more intelligently figure out what the actual diff is. It's kind of hard to describe.

But anyway, I don't want to get into like implementation details here. I want to talk about the big picture. So I. Morph time sort of because it's the thing that I've been using and I've been hacking on it. Like I have like duct tape around it and things like that. I've actually, you know pulled it into the project and change specific lines in the code base.

So I kind of own it in my project and their gives you there's like a certain feeling about. About a package that you haven't written about really any code that you haven't written. It doesn't always feel good and your judgements usually clouded. I think a lot of there's like a lot of biases there.

A lot of people think that the code is more poorly written than it actually is if they didn't write it there's all that sort of stuff and it really is hard to reason about there's like one giant while loop with a while loop nested inside of it and a ton of conditionals like probably like eight layers of nesting really hard to follow.

So I definitely feel that way about this code base. I don't understand it makes me feel bad. So of course, there's always the rewrite in the sky well for talk about the rewrite in the sky. There's always new plugins that you can try and I've tried them before I wasted a couple weekends on you trying to switch to a virtual Dom diffing Library.

So I went back to the internet and. Try to see you know, what's out there. What are the alternatives to morphdom morphdom is specific in some specific ways for for a tool like Livewire that I can't just use any Dom differ because a lot of them work with virtual dumbs which live where doesn't use and if that doesn't make sense to you don't worry about it, but there's kind of this niche of Dom differs that work with actual Dom in the browser, which is what Livewire needs so I found an alternative that I don't know if I have some wood across before which is kind of crazy.

Decently popular, you know, the first thing I look at is GitHub Stars. It's funny. It's kind of an arbitrary metric but really it's like it's kind of like on Amazon when you look at. Like sometimes I just look at the amount of reviews and that is that like Swayze my decision, you know. Yeah, so I look at GitHub stars and I go all right.

Is this something that is just Niche somebody started a year ago or two years ago and they're not going to continue keeping up or whatever. So I look at GitHub stars and I look at the last commit date. Those are two things I look at when I open up a GitHub repository. The last commit date was an August that's not bad.

And there's like 500 something GitHub Stars. That's also not bad. I think morph Tom has like 2,000 now, but when I started using it, it was more like a thousand so. So this all looks good to me. I'm like, okay this could work. And so I pull it down. I open a new branch and I pull it down just to do a