Ossido 0.1.7: native text encoders for faster rendering

0.1.7 is a focused performance release: the SSR runtime now uses native text encoders.

The overhead hiding in TextEncoder

Ossido renders React on a V8 isolate, and that isolate runs a small runtime for the web APIs React's server renderer expects. Text encoding was one of them - turning rendered markup into bytes to stream, and decoding byte chunks back into strings - and it ran through a JavaScript polyfill (fast-text-encoding).

Profiling a page that renders a large dataset made the cost plain: encoding and decoding dominated, and the polyfill was a big part of it. For markup-heavy pages that overhead scales with the size of the output.

Native, in Rust

0.1.7 replaces the polyfill with TextEncoder and TextDecoder implemented natively in Rust and installed directly into every isolate. Encoding and decoding the HTML stream now happens in native code instead of interpreted JavaScript, so the same render emits its bytes with far less overhead - and the bigger the page, the more it saves.

Nothing changes in your code; it's a transparent speed-up. These native codecs join the isolate's other native globals - timers, an async MessageChannel, and URLSearchParams - covered in Internals.

Upgrading

Bump to 0.1.7, or just run ossido upgrade:

ossido upgrade --version 0.1.7

The full diff is in the 0.1.7 release notes (0.1.6...0.1.7).