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React: Mixins Considered Harmful

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Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#31

Post by [deleted] »

auvrw wrote: post #27
n0us wrote: post #8

I personally moved all my projects away from mixins a while ago when I first heard they were deprecated. At first I was frustrated because of JS churn but this certainly was the right move. For anyone who is apprehensive, the shift in thinking from using mixins to HOCs was not so difficult even if it's initially puzzling. Quick edit: forgot to mention that this shift made my code way easier to understand in some plac…

from the article > Let’s make it clear that mixins are not technically deprecated. If you use React.createClass(), you may keep using them. We only say that they didn’t work well for us, and so we won’t recommend using them in the future.

[deleted]

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#33

Post by Bahamut »

nathancahill wrote: post #29
Bahamut wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? This sounds like it's more true of Angular than React - there is a widely adopted style guide, and well-known anti-patterns are very established. I don't get that impression with React.

I added "to pick one" because I don't particularly want to start a flame thread over frameworks. Everyone can choose their own tools for their jobs. However, to the point about style guide/anti-patterns: I guess we haven't been working in the same codebases.. I've worked on a handful of different projects and most have scope flying all of the place, with controllers and directives used interchangeably (not to mention…

Well, I commented mainly because of this

> There's One Way™ to do things correctly. Using anti-pattern "hacks" will work for a little bit, but in the long run come back to bite you as your software grows and scales.

This is true, but in the given context that this is not true in the Angular world, that is definitely false. Some of the things you've mentioned are considered known abuses/anti-patterns/etc.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#34

Post by danabramov »

kimmshibal wrote: post #32

I ported my app from React to Vue in 2 days. Couldn't be happier

That sounds great. Evan put a lot of effort in Vue, and it’s satisfying to see it paying off! While this is very tangential to the article, could you elaborate on what you struggled with in React? We are always looking out for things we could improve.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#35

Post by daliwali »

danabramov wrote: post #13
daliwali wrote: post #9

It doesn't fare well that a framework that is only 3 years old already has an extensive list of anti-patterns and tons of statements on what not to do. Also having to do manual performance optimizations using the framework is a hassle to application developers and can be a major pitfall (ex. PureRenderMixin, shouldComponentUpdate).

>It doesn't fare well that a framework that is only 3 years old already has an extensive list of anti-patterns and tons of statements on what not to do. Doesn’t programming in general have solutions that scale well, and solutions that don’t scale well? Would you rather not have people writing about their experiences because it “doesn’t fare well”? We are just sharing some things that worked well for us, and some thin…

A corollary to what I'm saying is that the design patterns that are espoused by React authors can be eliminated by using another abstraction, they're specific to React and have nothing to do with programming in general. I wouldn't go so far as to say, never use mixins in JavaScript, for example.

>You don’t “have to” do those optimizations.

Sure, but it seems to be a trade off of complexity for user experience. It's just covering up a leaky abstraction.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#36

Post by bcherny »

Implementing mixins correctly in JS (which React does not) is already a well explored problem space.

I like https://leanpub.com/javascript-spessore for great explorations and derivations of various mixin patterns.

It's not that mixins are bad in general, it's that React doesn't implement them well in particular.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#37

Post by baddox »

daliwali wrote: post #9

It doesn't fare well that a framework that is only 3 years old already has an extensive list of anti-patterns and tons of statements on what not to do. Also having to do manual performance optimizations using the framework is a hassle to application developers and can be a major pitfall (ex. PureRenderMixin, shouldComponentUpdate).

I don't understand. For any framework there are lots of things that you shouldn't do. Are you complaining that these things exist, or that they're documented? Surely it's better to have them documented.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#38

Post by sotojuan »

nathancahill wrote: post #19
spicyj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If simple things were possible before with React, then they still are, and that's not changing. You don't need Flux and Redux a lot of the time; in my experience they're overused and React component state is underused. I agree the community mentality of adding lots of complexity on top is a problem. We're working on improving this, but if you have ideas I'd be interested to hear them too.

> "in my experience they're overused and React component state is underused" Thank you, I've felt the same way. A lot of projects take "ALL STATE MUST BE IN THE STORE" to an extreme.

Which is funny because you'll never hear that from Dan or any other authors.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#39

Post by danabramov »

bcherny wrote: post #36

Implementing mixins correctly in JS (which React does not) is already a well explored problem space. I like https://leanpub.com/javascript-spessore for great explorations and derivations of various mixin patterns. It's not that mixins are bad in general, it's that React doesn't implement them well in particular.

Sure, it may be React’s mixin implementation that is subpar. However we noticed we didn’t need mixins (of any kind) with the patterns described in the post. Just components and functions turned out to be enough for our needs, and this is why we wrote this post.

I think the post specifically addresses this point:

>This doesn’t mean that mixins themselves are bad. People successfully employ them in different languages and paradigms, including some functional languages. At Facebook, we extensively use traits in Hack which are fairly similar to mixins. Nevertheless, we think that mixins are unnecessary and problematic in React codebases.

Maybe I should have highlighted that they can work well in JavaScript too—we just didn’t find a good use case in React apps at Facebook.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#40

Post by spicyj »

bcherny wrote: post #36

Implementing mixins correctly in JS (which React does not) is already a well explored problem space. I like https://leanpub.com/javascript-spessore for great explorations and derivations of various mixin patterns. It's not that mixins are bad in general, it's that React doesn't implement them well in particular.

Can you outline the biggest problems with React's mixins? I haven't heard this complaint before.
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