Ask HN: Which would you use for a new Project (ReactJS or AngularJS)?

that's dependent on the problem at hand. Are you building a site that has a lot of moving parts on the same page, that needs to communicate nuanced state changes across components? If so, react/flux is a godsend, since the system will be easier to maintain and customize.

Is your site made up of many different views that don't change much once loaded? Then angular would be a fine tool for the problem. You would likely move much faster initially, since Angular handles a lot of problems with data binding and routing for you.

And finally, are you sure you need either of these frameworks? If you want your front end to consume JSON but it isn't particularly dynamic, something like backbone will probably be good enough. Hell, server-rendered templates do the job in a lot of cases. No reason to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

This reads like satire, because who the hell would not want to build something solid or understand what's happening in their app?

Also, the most common complaint about Angular is that it's very hard to understand, very opaque, and lacking in documentation, so your only "pro" for Angular is a pretty unusual one.

I don't think you always need to know exactly what's going on. Angular is a lot like Rails in my mind -- there is "magic", but it makes things easier.

Personally, I never thought Angular was very hard to understand. The main problem is that the documentation is sometimes outdated. If you are familiar with server-side MVC, I think Angular will come naturally to you.

But, if my post sounds biased towards React, it's because I prefer it. I would use Angular for things you want to do in four days and never touch again, but that's about it.

Yeah, it totally sucks. That is one of the reasons that, in projects that I expect to be maintaining for a long time, I shy away from frameworks with inversion of control, like Angular or Rails. I prefer the wiring to be exposed, so to speak, because it makes it easier for everyone to know what's going on. It also makes it easier to drop or upgrade your 3rd party dependencies without rewriting everything.

Well,

1) if I understood correctly, the design of Angular has some inherent, and rather large, performance hits.

2) Google isn't dogfooding Angular save for one project. Facebook seem pretty serious about doing all new developement in React.

3) the specific kind of developement they're doing is similar to the one I have to do right now, viz. taking an established mostly static page and adding bits of highly interactive and dynamic behavior here and there. Google used Angular to reimplement the app from scratch. I can't afford that.

4) Angular, at what will probably the top of its popularity right now, just broke all interfaces and syntax and everything during the passage to 2.0, for reasons that were never fully explained (to me at least). Facebook won't be able to do that without breaking the proportionally large investment they had so far with React.js and incurring significant costs, which is nice and stable and comfortable. If the benefit/cost ratio of React 2.0 (or 1.0, I guess) is acceptable for Facebook, then it will probably be acceptable for me, too.

5) React interacts nicely with their Flow typechecker, which I think is, uh, the safest vector, right now, to foster the adoption of algebraic typing in the mainstream of programming. I won't typecheck my JS before the summer, probably, but still, this is philosophically fun.