Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 422 posts

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#71

Post by dntrkv »

metalliqaz wrote: post #36
acemarke wrote: post #11

I'll repeat the comment I made in the "React 15.5" thread a couple weeks ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14063818 ): For those who are interested in some of the details of the work that's going on, Lin Clark's recent talk on "A Cartoon Intro to Fiber" at ReactConf 2017 is excellent [0]. There's a number of other existing writeups and resources on how Fiber works [1] as well. The roadmap for 15.5 and 16.0 m…

I admire your exceptional work cataloguing these resources. However, just one look at that giant horde of links is, to me, a perfect demonstration of why the front-end development ecosystem is way out of control. Its amazing to me that the autoconf/automake/libtool system for making write-once-run-everywhere *nix applications is downright simple by today's standards. Every year the hot libraries change, the build too…

Browsers and JavaScript are what we have, we can't magically replace every browser and JS implementation in the world. We have to figure out where we want to go and slowly get there. That is exactly what is happening in the frontend world and that is why there is so much churn.

Browser apps have to work across 4 major browsers with versions going back almost 10 years, an infinite amount of screen sizes, and a near infinite amount of devices. There is no other platform with the capabilities of the browser that has this much reach.

If we had the ability to start from scratch and build the ultimate web platform, yes, it would probably be way better than what we have, but we don't have that ability nor will we ever have it, so talking about it is a waste of time. We need to look at our current capabilities, where we want to be in the future, and iterate until we get there.

All of the tooling we have serves a purpose and solves a problem, it's not like frontend devs are adding tooling for the fuck of it.

Take a common stack nowadays: React, Redux, Webpack, Babel, Eslint, Yarn, Styled Components

Every single one of those tools in the stack make my life easier. I don't have to use all of them. In fact, there was a time where I didn't, but I would never want to go back to that time because these tools allow me to build way more complex apps way faster than I used to. And the other great thing about these tools is you can add/remove them as needed. Take something like browser prefixes, as browser support for certain prefixes or features are implemented at a large enough scale, the tooling for that becomes obsolete and you drop it.

And as far as JavaScript goes, pre ES6 I would agree, it sucked. Post-ES6, I will have to disagree. I love writing JS nowadays.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#72

Post by kccqzy »

adventist wrote: post #56
kccqzy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite possible to use react with nothing else: no build tools, no transpilers, no fancy JSX, so in terms of tooling complexity, it can be as simple as you want or as complex as you want. Regarding the complexity of the underlying system, I think this is not a concern of the typical frontend developer. It has nothing to do with JavaScript or the web. If you are writing a "simple" C program on Linux, would you be…

Any resources you can provide about how to use React without JSX? JSX is a blocker for me.

> JSX is not a requirement for using React. Using React without JSX is especially convenient when you don't want to set up compilation in your build environment.

> Each JSX element is just syntactic sugar for calling React.createElement(component, props, ...children). So, anything you can do with JSX can also be done with just plain JavaScript.

Source: https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/react-without-jsx.html

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#73

Post by awinograd »

maelito wrote: post #58

> It’s already in use on Facebook.com today What's preventing us from using it in our apps then ? Do they limit the use of the API to what's implemented in Fiber in some parts of the website ?

Not limited at all! You can install react@next from npm and use fiber today. It's just not released as a production ready version.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#74

Post by ng12 »

adventist wrote: post #56
kccqzy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite possible to use react with nothing else: no build tools, no transpilers, no fancy JSX, so in terms of tooling complexity, it can be as simple as you want or as complex as you want. Regarding the complexity of the underlying system, I think this is not a concern of the typical frontend developer. It has nothing to do with JavaScript or the web. If you are writing a "simple" C program on Linux, would you be…

Any resources you can provide about how to use React without JSX? JSX is a blocker for me.

It's basically just to use the React.createElement API that JSX transpiles to. I say give JSX a chance though.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#75

Post by acemarke »

adventist wrote: post #56
kccqzy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite possible to use react with nothing else: no build tools, no transpilers, no fancy JSX, so in terms of tooling complexity, it can be as simple as you want or as complex as you want. Regarding the complexity of the underlying system, I think this is not a concern of the typical frontend developer. It has nothing to do with JavaScript or the web. If you are writing a "simple" C program on Linux, would you be…

Any resources you can provide about how to use React without JSX? JSX is a blocker for me.

Sure. At the bare minimum, you write "manual" `React.createElement()` calls. To simplify or shorten things, you can alias `React.createElement()` to something like `h()`.

There's also a variety of libs to help with that process. We have an existing ES5/Backbone app that's built with Require.js, and we don't have a "compile" step in there. We just added our first couple React+Redux-based features into that codebase, but can't use JSX due to that lack of compilation. I opted to bring in https://github.com/Jador/react-hyperscript-helpers as an alternative to JSX. Not perfect, but it's a suitable alternative given our limitations. There's several other "virtual DOM/hyperscript"-ish packages out there as well.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#76

Post by [deleted] »

paganel wrote: post #49
colordrops wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about others but I tire of these comments chiding the "out of control" front-end ecosystem. The situation has already changed years ago. We aren't going to get off of your lawn while you continue to beat a dead horse. The web is built on open standards and there are billions of pages and apps out there. To expect web development to be a perfect monoculture is a failure of your imagination and ability to…

Not the OP, but I expect the web to be a thing where documents (i.e. mainly text) don't have any issues rendering on my 5-year old phone or on my 8-year laptop (both of which work very well, still, and which I don't plan to replace anytime soon). The recent web practices (I'm talking mostly of the last 2-3 years, since more and more people have started copying Twitter with its launch of its "every website needs to be…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#77

Post by robertfw »

andr3w321 wrote: post #57

No thanks I'll stick with plain html and jquery for the frontend of my small projects. Plain javascript works perfectly fine as long as you namespace your functions and separate them into different files. All these frameworks end up creating much more problems than they solve.

> All these frameworks end up creating much more problems than they solve.

For small projects, sure, they might. But working at larger scale falls apart using plain html and jquery.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#78

Post by catpolice »

acemarke wrote: post #11

I'll repeat the comment I made in the "React 15.5" thread a couple weeks ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14063818 ): For those who are interested in some of the details of the work that's going on, Lin Clark's recent talk on "A Cartoon Intro to Fiber" at ReactConf 2017 is excellent [0]. There's a number of other existing writeups and resources on how Fiber works [1] as well. The roadmap for 15.5 and 16.0 m…

Finding my "State Architecture Patterns in React" article series on this excellent list of yours was a nice surprise. Thanks!

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#79

Post by ng12 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #69
ng12 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the browser is a bad app platform and javascript is a bad language Yeah, and we're finally making real progress towards making it better. I used to do web development because nobody else wanted to, now I do because it's really fun. This is a forum for hackers -- we should be excited about the unsolved problems instead of complaining that things are changing.

I'm not complaining that things are changing, I'm complaining that things are changing for the worse.

And you are totally wrong about that. This is the most exciting time to be a web developer since jQuery first came out. I promise it only looks that way from the outside.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#80

Post by mod »

melq wrote: post #47
metalliqaz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire your exceptional work cataloguing these resources. However, just one look at that giant horde of links is, to me, a perfect demonstration of why the front-end development ecosystem is way out of control. Its amazing to me that the autoconf/automake/libtool system for making write-once-run-everywhere *nix applications is downright simple by today's standards. Every year the hot libraries change, the build too…

Why is an active ecosystem with healthy competition a bad thing? Personally, I can't stand javascript, and why you'd ever elect to use it for backend/server side code mystifies me. So I don't use it (or work in web development), and couldn't care less about what platform the hip web devs deem acceptable.

I mostly agree, however it does seem to make some sense to dive deep into one ecosystem, instead of learning & keeping up with two. (Let's not pretend that Javascript is the only one advancing--Django of a few years ago is not compatible with Django of today, as one other example).

I have always used python/ruby on the backend, and I prefer them, but I recently worked on a couple of javascript backend projects, and I found one abhorrent and the other quite pleasant.

As could probably be expected, the practices used to develop the latter were just better. (These were even done by the same developers, in large part, and the differences were mainly lessons learned).

Anyway, if you're already working in a javascript-heavy front-end like React, it doesn't seem like such a stretch to use it on the backend, too.

Post reply on HN