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
Cheng Lou is claiming a serious userland breakthrough: a fast, accurate, comprehensive text-measurement algorithm in pure TypeScript that can lay out whole web pages without leaning on DOM measurement/reflow. For you the interesting bit is not hype but architecture: if real, it points toward more deterministic browserless layout engines, richer editor/rendering stacks, and possibly cleaner separation between layout computation and the DOM.
