Note: If you’re looking for information on Houdini or Toggle, you’re in the right spot. After changing the project name from Toggle to Houdini (for SEO reasons), we’ve switched again (there was another Houdini already). If you know of another language called “Presto” please let us know, we’ve got more names.
At Carbon Five we pride ourselves in crafting amazing web experiences using the best tools and technologies available. Over the years we’ve tried basically every language and framework combo there is. Java & Spring, Ruby & Rails, Python & Django, JavaScript & Node, Go & ??, C# & ASP.NET (OK, not that one), and even Perl & PHP (or that one).
Over the years we’ve noticed that it seems like every day, all day, all our fancy code boils down one basic thing: showing and hiding DIVs. That’s it. Send a bunch of DOM to the browser, then toggle those DIVs on and off. Logged in? Show a DIV. Logged out? Hide a DIV. Click a tab? Yup, another DIV.
So, we’ve gone and done it. We wrote our own language, Presto. And Presto is all about showing and hiding DIVs. Fast. How? Read on. It’s like magic.
//div[id=’foo’]/div[class=’login’] => presto()
Clarity, Simplicity, Deceit.
The Cuttlefish
That’s right, O’Reilly. We’re ready.
Platform | Time to show & hide 1,000 DIVs |
---|---|
Chrome | 21ms |
iOS Webkit | 55 ms |
Opening & closing my eyes really fast | 500 ms* |
* I had trouble measuring this because in the middle I passed out. If you count that time, then probably about 6 or 7 hours.
Mike is the President and CEO of Carbon Five.