On: Coding Horror: What's Wrong With CSS

[pstuart]

Noted in the comments of the article is that less is moving to JavaScript.

http://github.com/cloudhead/less.js

[juvenn → pstuart]

That new node-based v2.0+ implementation can be 10x faster than the ruby-based implementation.

    # Ruby version
    $ time lessc -v
    lessc 1.2.21 

    real	0m1.681s
    user	0m1.492s
    sys	        0m0.176s


    # Node.js version
    $ time lss -v
    lessc 2.0.0 (LESS Compiler)

    real	0m0.104s
    user	0m0.088s
    sys	0m0.016s

Though it should be noted that Rubygems has introduced a bit overhead in the Ruby version.

[jamie_ca → juvenn]

I'm disappointed with this change - it seems like picking up the new shiny tech for the sake of new shiny tech, at the expense of usability. My mac came with ruby, but not node.

Also, a 1.5-second speedup is not terribly compelling for something done rather infrequently (and if you're not caching or pre-processing to static files, you're doing it wrong).

[sjs → jamie_ca]

One reason to move to JavaScript is so that you can process LESS on the server and client. This way you can serve up a static LESS file and let the user's browser parse it, cutting out the extra compilation step. But you can still compile it beforehand and serve up the CSS directly if you don't want or cannot afford the performance hit on the client.

At the very least I could see myself using it in the browser for development.

[aaronblohowiak → jamie_ca]

installing node on your mac takes all of 5 minutes if you already have ports installed. speed in development turnaround is important to me.