by Dustin Getz, August 20, 2024
18 months ago, we released Electric v2 and early adopters have been running it in production since last summer, to build rich web experiences that simply have too much interactivity, realtime streaming, and too rich network connections to be able to write all the frontend/backend network plumbing by hand.
With Electric v2, we demonstrated that we weren’t crazy, this thing is commercially viable in real apps. But it also had growing pains: rendering collections was tricky, and v2’s electric lambdas had serious shortcomings.
Electric v3 is a rewrite of the network runtime, fixing and resolving these issues with a new computational structure based on differential dataflow: diffs through the reactivity graph from database to dom, no collections sent over the wire ever, only diffs.
This talk is a preview of Electric v3, in the form of working examples, where we will dive into the nuance of writing network transparent programs in practice, demonstrating how Electric v3's differential semantics reveal and align with the deep computational structure of a user interface.
Dustin Getz is a co-founder of Hyperfiddle, low-code declarative infrastructure for user interfaces. Hyperfiddle's mission is to collapse to zero the cost of frontend development for a wide range of applications, by applying distributed systems and concurrency techniques to build a new class of UI infrastructure. Dustin's research interest is in the computational structure of user interfaces.