Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

I'm really curious as to why they felt the need to work on improving performance.[1]

Were people complaining it was too slow? Were the performance improvements just the benefit of refactoring they did for other reasons?

Considering the build happens once during your build phase, taking under half a second doesn't seem like something I would even bother looking at. So it just jumps out to me, so I'm just curious.

[1] https://tailwindcss.com/docs/v4-beta#new-high-performance-en...

I absolutely care about things that take hundreds of milliseconds for my builds. The faster I can build, the faster I can iteratively try new things things out. The goal should be to be able to see changes instantly after you make them, and Tailwind is usually just 1 part of a build pipeline.

Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is probably the best demonstration of why this matters; in the first 10 minutes he shows a very concrete example of an insight that would not have occurred without instant feedback https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGqwXt90ZqA

> I absolutely care about things that take hundreds of milliseconds for my builds. The faster I can build, the faster I can iteratively try new things things out. The goal should be to be able to see changes instantly after you make them, and Tailwind is usually just 1 part of a build pipeline.

When we're talking about ms the build is not the thing that is affecting your ability to try new things out. It was already so fast it was near instant.

1. Tailwind is just 1 part of a build system, and it all adds up

2. Watch Inventing on Principle if you haven't already. Pushing build times into milliseconds or sub-milliseconds enables new capabilities

If you want to try new things out and move fast with your CSS, you're not building the entire system. It's a partial build and that was already faster than you would even be able to react. Your browser refreshing would take longer.