We've Been Compiling Web Apps Wrong for a Decade

I just read a performance benchmark that broke my understanding of what's possible in web development. Not because the numbers were good—but because they were so impossibly good that I had to read them three times to believe they were real.

Traditional React App: 2.3 seconds to interactive

Vue.js Application: 2.1 seconds to interactive

Juris (Fine-Grained): ~5 milliseconds to interactive

Juris (Batch Mode): ~4.5 milliseconds to interactive

That's not a typo. Five milliseconds. For a complex dashboard application.

That's not 10% faster than React. That's not even 10x faster. That's 400-500x faster.

And when I dug into how this was possible, I realized we've been fundamentally approaching web application architecture wrong for over a decade.

The Assumption We Never Questioned

Every major framework—React, Vue, Angular, Svelte—operates on the same basic assumption:

"Compile all components, optimize the compilation."

We've spent years perfecting this approach:

• Faster bundlers (webpack → rollup → vite → esbuild)
• Better tree shaking
• Smarter code splitting
• Advanced lazy loading
• Sophisticated caching strategies

But we never questioned the fundamental premise: Why are we compiling components that users can't see?

The Netflix Problem

Think about Netflix's homepage. How many components do you think are defined in their codebase?

• Movie cards
• Navigation menus
• Search interfaces
• User profiles
• Recommendation engines
• Video players
• Rating systems
• Category browsers
• And hundreds more...

Now, how many of those components are actually visible when you first load the homepage? Maybe 20-30.

But traditional frameworks compile ALL of them.

Every single time. Even the video player component that won't be used unless you click on a movie. Even the profile settings that won't be accessed unless you navigate to your account. Even the advanced search interface that 90% of users never touch.

We're essentially loading an entire encyclopedia to read one page.

What Juris Discovered

According to their whitepaper, Juris took a radically different approach:

"Only compile components that are actually in the current view."

For an enterprise application with 500+ components:

Components in View: 50
Components Compiled (Traditional): 500 (100%)
Components Compiled ([Juris](https://jurisjs.com/)): 50 (10%)

Traditional frameworks: Compile everything, use some of it

Juris: Compile only what you need, when you need it

This isn't optimization. This is architectural revolution.

The Scaling Revelation

Here's where it gets really mind-bending. As your application grows:

Traditional frameworks get slower:

• 100 components → compile 100 components
• 500 components → compile 500 components
• 1000 components → compile 1000 components

Juris stays the same speed:

• 100 components → compile ~20 visible components
• 500 components → compile ~20 visible components
• 1000 components → compile ~20 visible components

The performance doesn't degrade with application complexity because the compilation cost is tied to what's visible, not what exists.

This breaks the fundamental "law" of web development that large applications must be slow applications.

Why We Missed This

The answer is embarrassingly simple: we were solving the wrong problem.

For a decade, the entire industry has been focused on:

• "How do we make component compilation faster?"
• "How do we optimize bundle sizes?"
• "How do we improve tree shaking?"

But no one asked: "Do we need to compile these components at all?"

It's like we spent years perfecting how to carry books faster, without ever questioning why we were carrying the entire library.

The Implications Are Staggering

If these performance numbers are real—and the architectural logic suggests they are—this changes everything:

For Users:

• Web apps that feel instant, not fast
• Mobile performance becomes a non-issue
• Complex applications that load like simple websites

For Developers:

• No more loading spinners for initial app loads
• Build times that don't grow with application complexity
• Performance optimization becomes largely unnecessary

For Businesses:

• Lower server costs (faster loading = less bandwidth)
• Higher conversion rates (speed directly impacts user behavior)
• Ability to build complex features without performance penalties

The iPhone Moment

There are certain technological breakthroughs that don't just improve things—they make entirely new experiences possible.

The iPhone wasn't just a better phone. It enabled entirely new categories of applications because the interaction model was so fundamentally different.

This feels similar. When web applications become truly instant, it enables user experiences that aren't possible with 2-second load times.

Imagine:

• Dashboard applications that feel like native desktop apps
• E-commerce sites where browsing feels like flipping through a physical catalog
• Educational platforms where switching between lessons has zero friction
• Creative tools where performance never breaks your flow state

The Questions This Raises

Have we been over-engineering performance solutions for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place?

How many "performance best practices" become irrelevant when the fundamental architecture is this efficient?

What becomes possible when web applications load in milliseconds instead of seconds?

Are we about to see a new generation of web applications that feel fundamentally different because they're built on this architecture?

The Pattern Recognition

Every major shift in web development follows the same pattern:

1. Industry accepts fundamental limitation ("Web apps are slow", "Mobile web is inferior", "Large SPAs must be complex")
2. Someone questions the limitation ("What if we didn't need to compile everything?")
3. Breakthrough makes limitation obsolete (5ms load times make performance optimization largely irrelevant)
4. New possibilities emerge (User experiences that weren't feasible before)

We've seen this with:

• AJAX making dynamic web pages possible
• Responsive design making mobile-first possible
• Component architecture making complex UIs manageable
• Modern JavaScript making full-stack JS possible

Each time, the breakthrough wasn't just "better"—it enabled entirely new categories of applications.

Why This Matters Now

The timing feels significant. Users' expectations for web performance have never been higher. Google's Core Web Vitals make performance a ranking factor. Mobile-first design is table stakes.

But we've been fighting performance battles with incremental improvements: slightly faster bundlers, marginally better compression, cleverer caching strategies.

Juris suggests we've been fighting the wrong war entirely. Instead of optimizing compilation, eliminate unnecessary compilation.

The Scary Part

What scares me isn't that this approach might not work. What scares me is that it might work perfectly, and we might miss it.

Because 5-millisecond load times sound "too good to be true." Because the approach sounds "too simple." Because it challenges assumptions that an entire industry has built careers on.

But every revolutionary breakthrough in computing has looked "too simple" at first:

• "Why would anyone need a personal computer?"
• "Who wants a web browser on their phone?"
• "What's the point of a component-based UI?"

The simplest explanations are often the most profound.

What's Next?

I don't know if Juris specifically will be the framework that makes this approach mainstream. But the architectural insight—only compile what's visible—feels like one of those ideas that's so obviously correct in hindsight that it becomes inevitable.

Someone, somewhere, is building the next generation of web applications using this approach. They're creating user experiences that feel impossible with traditional frameworks. They're solving problems we don't even know we have yet.

And they're doing it with 5-millisecond load times.

The question isn't whether this approach will become mainstream. The question is whether we'll recognize it when it does.

Have you ever experienced a web app that loaded so fast it felt broken? That moment of confusion when something works better than you expected it to?

That might be what the future feels like. And it might be arriving faster than we think.

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What do you think? Are we witnessing a fundamental shift in web application architecture, or am I getting caught up in impressive benchmarks? I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether compile-time optimization has reached its limits.