🚨SOMEONE REINVENTED HOW TEXT RENDERS ON THE WEB AND ITS ABSOLUTELY INSANE.
the goated dev behind react, reasonML, and midjourney’s frontend, just dropped Pretext. a tiny typescript library that measures and lays out text 500x faster than the DOM.
he trained models against real browser rendering for weeks until the output matched safari, chrome, and firefox exactly.
the demos are insane!! hundreds of thousands of text boxes at 120fps. magazine layouts and chat bubbles that actually wrap right.
engineers from Vercel, Remix, Figma, and shadcn all cosigned. this is the kind of open source that makes you want to be a better dev.
here are some cool demos in the past 24hrs👇
My dear front-end developers (and anyone who’s interested in the future of interfaces):
I have crawled through depths of hell to bring you, for the foreseeable years, one of the more important foundational pieces of UI engineering (if not in implementation then certainly at least in concept):
Fast, accurate and comprehensive userland text measurement algorithm in pure TypeScript, usable for laying out entire web pages without CSS, bypassing DOM measurements and reflow