It’s not every day you see a new processor for building websites that reinvents the syntax for HTML and CSS and JavaScript. That’s what imba is doing.
That’s an awful lot of vendor lock-in, but I guess if you get over the learning curve and it helps you build performant websites quickly, then it’s no different than picking any other stack of processing languages.
I would hope their ultimate goal is to compile to native apps across platforms, but if not, if a developer wants to learn an entirely new way to craft an app, they might as well pick Flutter. As far as I understand it, the Flutter syntax is also quite a learning curve, but if you build your app that way, it makes good on the promise that it runs natively across all the major native mobile and desktop platforms, including the web.
Interesting. I want to see someone adopt this.
I’ve been following Imba for a while now.
Part of the attraction here is functional programming, and a very high degree of type safety.
It produces very small JavaScript files, with extremely high performance, by avoiding the virtual DOM – so on the (still rare) category of UI frameworks like Svelte.
One thing that keeps me away, is the fact that, yeah, it replaces your entire stack. Personally, I especially don’t like the idea of replacing CSS – the property names aren’t even the same. Svelte sort of replaces/extends HTML, but at least retains things like CSS. (although it subtly changes the meaning.)
I guess people seem comfortable with these days though – Tailwind essentially replaces every CSS property with a class name, and people seem to love that. I guess if the reward is enough to balance the added learning curve…?
With Imba, I don’t know – I’ve only been watching from the sidelines. But I definitely wouldn’t dismiss it.
As for the Dart/Flutter comparison, Dart is an okay language – but Imba is more on the functional side, and offers more safety. Dart is closer to JavaScript/Typescript and easier to integrate with existing JS libraries – very strict and functional languages like Imba or Elm require adapters, where Dart/Typescript just need type declarations.
I think for something like Imba or Elm to really pay off, you have to be fully invested on a new project – write everything in the language.
It’s a front end language though, so no direct opportunity to keep anything isomorphic with the server-side – it’s going to be back end and front end, like two separate worlds.
Again though, I guess some people like that.
I didn’t see any mention of progressive enhancement on their site, which made me sigh in frustration at yet another framework that devotes itself to solving problems that already have a bunch of mostly good enough solutions out there but ignores one half of the experience entirely. They do say this:
Given that imba.io is just a blank page without JavaScript, though, I have to assume it’s not a priority.
One of the things which draws me to Svelte is that being able to function without JavaScript (wherever possible, of course) is a priority. It’s not about replacing the web, it’s about making the web better. I wish more people would take that approach.