I belligerently hate Meta, but it's pretty wild to speculate that a company with 1.9 billion users will just up and die. A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen but I doubt React will still be popular by that time no matter what happens with Meta.
Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
#12Microsoft's Office division has enough bets on React and React Native I'd be surprised if React didn't survive regardless of Meta.
Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
#13Think of all the technologies that we use today that were invented at companies that no longer exist, or are no longer relevant. E.g. Java was invented at Sun, C at Bell Labs. Why would it be different?
Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
#14Look through your javascript dependencies. Is react really at the top of your list for worries of death? hah.
Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
#15Ideally a foundation of sorts would spin up to take over managing the project. There's more than enough companies with big pockets deeply invested in the React ecosystem.
Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
#16Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.
There's nothing about Facebook that anyone needs, that no one else provides. It could go as quickly as AOL.
Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
#17I would usually argue that there is no way the Facebook/Meta would die (it almost certainly wont) and so the question is redundant.
However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems to believe he is going to remain in total control forever, so who knows? Maybe one day the fact shareholders have no control will come back to bite him and the the share price will drop through the floor as confidence in him plumes to zero. Frankly maybe the last 48hours could be indicative of that.
In most companies the board would have required the resignation of the CEO after the historically bad results yesterday.
I suppose in some ways shares in Meta aren't really shares in Meta but shares in Zuckerberg himself.
Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
#18Interestingly we’re at the peak it seems. However none have shown any crazy adoption yet. Svelte seemed like it would be really popular but when pandemic hit I stopped hearing about it as much. Hopefully WASM will take over.
Vue is as old as React and seems like it’s relegated to being in Reacts shadow
Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
#19Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.
> Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Exactly, there's no way Meta will suddenly disappear and go poof, barring some kind of extreme government action or bizarre corpora-cidal action by its controlling shareholder Mark Zuckerberg.
Or, the worse possible: becoming unfashionable.
Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
#20Vercel/nextjs.org is a nontrivial company whose business fundamentally depends on supporting the React ecosystem.
And they aren’t the only one. And countless other companies depend on React “non-fundamentally” at this point.
React is Java now. At most it could start a gradual multi-decade decline (I don’t think this will happen, but it’s imaginable), but I’d bet consultants will still be getting paid to maintain/fix legacy React apps 40 years from now.