I think a lot of the optimization work was for dev time and it carried over to build time. I listened to a podcast interview with Adam Wathan where I think he said they just got really into shaving nanoseconds. They have a very successful business and I think they just enjoyed doing this work. On the other hand I do think even if you’re cutting from 50ms to 5ms (both low numbers in absolute terms) there are often new unforeseen workflows that become possible once you can do that operation so frequently that it’s free. You could do it on every keystroke.
> there are often new unforeseen workflows that become possible once you can do that operation so frequently that it’s free. You could do it on every keystroke.
That’s really interesting to think about actually! What kinds of practical things do you think could be enabled by an extremely fast tailwindcss?
I'm probably not going to be the one to figure them out, but like I suggested, hot reload on every keystroke is the first thing that comes to mind. It's probably better not to think of Tailwind CSS on its own here, but rather as one super fast part of a broader super fast build pipeline. Making Tailwind fast just means it's not the blocker. Imagine combining 10 or 20 tools that all have sub-millisecond incremental build times.
LLM trying design using tailwind, stuff like: try to recreate this bitmap image using tailwind utility classes; the iteration speed for that kind of tasks depend on such speed.
