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Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

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

#91

Post by mattnewton »

kerkeslager wrote: post #53
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…

Monocultures develop because one tool is far better than all the others. Javascript isn't a monoculture because all the tools are bad.

Monocultures develop because of corporate backing. The web being open and unclaimed is what leads to the great diversity. As someone who does both server and JavaScript development, the tools are not bad. Often times they solve real problems well.

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

#92

Post by eropple »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #65
acemarke wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seems to be a bit of a non-sequitur. Application development is complex, period. Posix development is complicated. Qt is big and complicated. Makefiles are complicated. Autotools is complicated. Big Java server apps are complicated. C++ is complicated. We've just hit the point where people are trying to do the same thing in a browser. Would you prefer to build your application using Make, Scons, Waf, CMa…

Rust, PHP had simple af builds/packaging. So no, not everything is complex, just old dinosaurs AND web.

PHP's packaging was only "simple af" until you had a binary dependency that wasn't part of your operating system.

Complicated things exist.

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

#93

Post by copperx »

colordrops wrote: post #70
kerkeslager wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monocultures develop because one tool is far better than all the others. Javascript isn't a monoculture because all the tools are bad.

By the way, the OP I responded to said "front-end", not "JavaScript". How does your attitude jive with WebAssembly which will allow you to compile C++ or Rust for the browser?

I've been struggling to understand how WebAssembly will change things on the web. Will you be able to compile an arbitrary C/C++ binary to run on a browser? Will syscalls be emulated? What about the filesystem?

It looks like to get such a thing working we would need an OS running on top of JS. But maybe I'm missing something.

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

#94

Post by ZenoArrow »

nightski wrote: post #50
acemarke wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seems to be a bit of a non-sequitur. Application development is complex, period. Posix development is complicated. Qt is big and complicated. Makefiles are complicated. Autotools is complicated. Big Java server apps are complicated. C++ is complicated. We've just hit the point where people are trying to do the same thing in a browser. Would you prefer to build your application using Make, Scons, Waf, CMa…

The benefits you acknowledge (distribution) are not because of the tech but in spite of it. At the end of the day all it would take is one of the 3 major browser vendors to offer an alternative. That alternative could be distributed to a large percentage of desktops in a relatively quick manner saving billions if not trillions of dollars in wasted productivity. It will never happen though. * EDIT: This comes from som…

>"At the end of the day all it would take is one of the 3 major browser vendors to offer an alternative."

You mean like Dart?

Besides, languages that target WebAssembly are almost certainly going to evolve to fit that space.

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

#95

Post by pygy_ »

majewsky wrote: post #87
conover wrote: post #16

http://isfiberreadyyet.com/

> This page is rendered with it. Yep, I can tell from the 5 seconds of blank screen while my phone browser loads all that JS.

I think it runs the test suite live... It's not meant to be fast, but to demonstrate compatibility.

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

#96

Post by mattnewton »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #65
acemarke wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seems to be a bit of a non-sequitur. Application development is complex, period. Posix development is complicated. Qt is big and complicated. Makefiles are complicated. Autotools is complicated. Big Java server apps are complicated. C++ is complicated. We've just hit the point where people are trying to do the same thing in a browser. Would you prefer to build your application using Make, Scons, Waf, CMa…

Rust, PHP had simple af builds/packaging. So no, not everything is complex, just old dinosaurs AND web.

I would never want to use php's "just recompile it with the new dependencies" approach ever again. It's a complete mess as soon as you go off the rails of what's included by default.

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

#97

Post by jpk »

goldbeck wrote: post #61
nightski wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefits you acknowledge (distribution) are not because of the tech but in spite of it. At the end of the day all it would take is one of the 3 major browser vendors to offer an alternative. That alternative could be distributed to a large percentage of desktops in a relatively quick manner saving billions if not trillions of dollars in wasted productivity. It will never happen though. * EDIT: This comes from som…

If this is such a good and valuable idea, why will it never happen? Seems the major internet-interface makers (Google via Chrome, FB via their app, for ex), are vying for control over the way people develop web applications too. Making an alternative that gets adopted would be invaluable to them.

It won't happen because none of them will implement the other guy's new thing. Chrome would do the Google thing, Edge would do the Microsoft thing, and Firefox would sit back and balk that none of that junk is standardized. Then webdevs would just stick with Javascript and friends because it's the only thing that mostly works everywhere. That's exactly what happened to Dart, right? It had aspirations of hopping into Chrome along side JS but who else was going to put it in their browser? Now it's just another thing that compiles to Javascript because that's the only way you'd get anybody to adopt it.

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

#98

Post by andr3w321 »

robertfw wrote: post #77
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.

I assume by scale you mean many pages and not many visitors. For something like hackernews plain html and jquery would work perfectly fine.

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

#99

Post by colordrops »

copperx wrote: post #93
colordrops wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, the OP I responded to said "front-end", not "JavaScript". How does your attitude jive with WebAssembly which will allow you to compile C++ or Rust for the browser?

I've been struggling to understand how WebAssembly will change things on the web. Will you be able to compile an arbitrary C/C++ binary to run on a browser? Will syscalls be emulated? What about the filesystem? It looks like to get such a thing working we would need an OS running on top of JS. But maybe I'm missing something.

There is clearly some sort of mapping available to a JavaScript FFI for doing I/O, as both the Unreal engine and Unity have been ported to WebAssembly. If you can run a video game engine in the browser you can run anything. I believe there are proposals in place as well to add opcodes to directly interface with browser capabilities rather than going through a JS FFI.

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

#100

Post by venture_lol »

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…

That's because noone really, truly, honestly want to RTFM of a given stack, library, etc.

It's more fun to roll your own or to pick up a new one.

I mean, in how may ways can you organize code that manipulate a DOM tree, pull data, massage data, and update the DOM tree? Well, the more the merrier :)

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