Introducing a new project, I'm working on for a fe...

# webassembly

[Robert Jaros]

Introducing a new project, I'm working on for a few weeks. Kilua is an experimental web framework for Kotlin/Wasm and Kotlin/JS. It's a very early stage, but I'm sharing the code. Any feedback is welcomed!
Please check: https://github.com/rjaros/kilua

[Pablichjenkov]

What's different from kvision? - the wasm support

[Robert Jaros]

The main difference is the compose runtime usage

[Robert Jaros]

State management and reactivity is now the core of the framework. There is also no virtual DOM because compose takes care of DOM manipulation.

[Robert Jaros]

KVision api is fully imperative - you can build the layout by creating components and adding them to containers (other components). The reactivity in KVision is a bit strange, because it's based on this imperative api. In Kilua you still have components but you can't build layout with them. Only composable functions are used to create layout.

[Pablichjenkov]

Gotcha, sounds like full rewrite 💪

[Robert Jaros]

Yes, it's a totally different framework (so no KVision2 or even KVision-NG but Kilua 🙂)

[Robert Jaros]

But still I plan to make it very KVision friendly 🙂 Many parts of KVision application code will be fully working Kilua application code.

[Pablichjenkov]

Sounds good

[james]

hey Robert this is really cool, nice work! I always liked KVision but didn’t do too much with it because I was being lazy and didn’t want to context-switch back into the imperative mode of thinking 😄

I will definitely be closely following Kilua, starred!

[sdeleuze]

Looks interesting, do you have data points for the minimal amount of data to download for a hello world?

[Robert Jaros]

Currently 14K main.bundle.js (4K gzipped) + about 1.5M wasm file (342K gzipped).

[sdeleuze]

Is the 1.5M coming from Compose infra ?

[sdeleuze]

I am asking because I had related discussion with Compose team about that.

[Robert Jaros]

I think so, compose + coroutines.

[sdeleuze]

Yeah, so that's the usual issue I would like to see solved one way of another.

[Robert Jaros]

Still not bad comparing to compose-web jetsnack example (9MB wasm file + 8MB skiko.wasm + 500KB skiko.js) 🙂

[sdeleuze]

Sure!

[sdeleuze]

I think the path you follow if the right one, we just need to optimize that minimal infra cost at some point

[Robert Jaros]

The same hello world compiled to JS target gives 427K bundle.

[sdeleuze]

And that require some design work

[Robert Jaros]

That size will grow a bit soon because kotlinx.serialization is coming to play 😉

[Robert Jaros]

Just learned about applyBinaryen option, which makes my hello-world example wasm file ~890KB (and just ~250KB gzipped).

[sdeleuze]

Yes, this is a must have. Maybe it should be enabled by default 🤔

[Robert Jaros]

With more aggressive optimizations (https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/CDFP59223/p1699375103842319?thread_ts=1699023406.875839&cid=CDFP59223) the hello world size is now 460KB (134KB gzipped)!