Hacker News: bennypowers

Show HN: Backlit – Lit Web Component SSR for Drupal via Go and WASM, No Node.js

bennypowers — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:15:38 +0000

Two years ago I posted about server-rendering Lit web components in Drupal using a Node.js sidecar container. It worked but felt like a proof of concept -- Docker, inter-container networking, an extra process to babysit.

Backlit replaces all of that with two lines:

  composer require bennypowers/backlit  
  drush en backlit

Composer downloads a pre-compiled Go binary for your platform. The binary embeds a WASM module (QuickJS + @lit-labs/ssr, compiled via Javy). Drupal pipes page HTML to the binary's stdin; rendered Declarative Shadow DOM HTML comes back on stdout. The WASM instance stays warm across requests: ~350ms cold start once per PHP-FPM worker, ~0.32ms per render after that.

The funny part: I didn't build this for Drupal. I built lit-ssr-wasm to add live component previews to `cem serve` -- a dev server for custom elements manifest tooling (https://github.com/bennypowers/cem). Once the WASM module existed, the Drupal integration was an afternoon's work.

WASM is to backend runtimes what web components are to the browser: write it once, run it anywhere.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47440918

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by bennypowers in "Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder"

bennypowers — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 19:50:19 +0000

Excellent! Thank you

New comment by bennypowers in "Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder"

bennypowers — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 10:37:21 +0000

Are you running the web platform tests?

New comment by bennypowers in "Ask HN: Anyone know of any largish applications built with WebComponents?"

bennypowers — Wed, 04 May 2022 14:14:04 +0000

SpaceX Dragon capsule's screens

Wordle

Photoshop

GitHub - Freaking GitHub!

Nintendo's website

Salesforce

Innumerable startup SaaS dashboards

New comment by bennypowers in "Ask HN: Anyone know of any largish applications built with WebComponents?"

bennypowers — Wed, 04 May 2022 14:13:17 +0000

should have posted this in r/confidentlyincorrect

Yeah, here's my youtube video from 3 years ago preemptively proving you wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz433mJR2ow

New comment by bennypowers in "Alternatives to JSX"

bennypowers — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 17:17:28 +0000

Why JSXBelPack when you can

  import { html, render } from 'https://unpkg.com/lit-html';

  const benefitTpl = ({name, desc}) => html`
    ${name}
    ${desc}
  `;
  
  render(html`
    
      ${benefits.map(benefitTpl)}
    `, document.body)

And updates are fast without any VDOM overhead.

New comment by bennypowers in "WebComponent libraries lit-HTML and litElement released"

bennypowers — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 21:05:44 +0000

Build GraphQL apps using lit-element for rendering with lit-apollo:

https://npm.im/@apollo-elements/lit-apollo

I built a demo chat app that got a 98 lighthouse performance score

https://lit-apollo-subscriptions.herokuapp.com

New comment by bennypowers in "Stripe Elements: Pre-built UI components to help you create checkout flows"

bennypowers — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 07:24:47 +0000

I built a little Polymer wrapper for stripe elements unfortunately, it only works with the polyfill. It seems at first blush to be an issue between Stripe's react components and shadowDOM.

https://github.com/bennypowers/stripe-elements/issues/2