Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by altern8tif » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 2:18 AM UTC

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…

So much negativity here. Constantly pushing the boundaries of existing technology is how we got here in the first place. If we were content with the status quo, we'd still be looking at a four-month journey from New York to San Francisco on horseback.

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

#252

Post by rashkov » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 2:20 AM UTC

acjohnson55 wrote: post #144

paganel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A web limited to textual content is a pretty quaint and uninspiring vision, IMO. The web started that way because static documents are relatively easy to represent, but the future (and present, for that matter) is rich experiences that can be distributed in the same way. But there are many steps left to get there, so either buckle up and help build that future, or get used to an ever-shrinking ecosystem of the purely…

Sure, but in the meantime the web is a much less accessible place for screen readers, underpowered mobile devices, and those without good internet connections

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

#253

Post by poxrud » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 2:21 AM UTC

red023 wrote: post #187

How does it compare with vue.js? I never worked with any modern JS framework like this but on paper I did not like writing CSS in javascript and vue.js had a normal way to write CSS and to me it looked superior in other ways as well.

I've been using React with CSS/SCSS files. You do not need to write CSS in javascript.

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

#254

Post by kerkeslager » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 2:27 AM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #79

kerkeslager wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am very much not looking at it from the outside.

ES6 is a step backward. Prototypical inheritance was one of the few things Javascript had going for it, but because CS majors who only learned Java in undergrad couldn't be bothered to learn prototypical inheritance now we have two incompatible inheritance systems instead. Promises are minor syntactic sugar over callbacks which could be implemented as a library. Meanwhile `this` still doesn't mean "this", there's still no integer or boolean types, accessing a nonexistent variable silently fails but happily continues execution, only reporting an error when it's far away from the problem. There's no threading, no security primitives, and no decent debugger. None of the problems are being fixed and the new features are either lackluster or make things worse.

And that's just the language itself. The ecosystem is in more of a shambles. Web development in the age of left-pad and global shared state being normal is exciting in the same sense as plagues of frogs and locusts are exciting: it's not boring but if it were boring that would be better.

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

#255

Post by hiram112 » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

altern8tif wrote: post #251

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…

So much negativity here. Constantly pushing the boundaries of existing technology is how we got here in the first place. If we were content with the status quo, we'd still be looking at a four-month journey from New York to San Francisco on horseback.

No it's more like we've got a 2 month journey on the Hindenburg.

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

#256

Post by kyrias » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

julian_1 wrote: post #199

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…

No-one could even agree on making HTML5 valid XML - in order to leverage all the tools and knowledge that exist in that space. Not that I even like XML. But having another XML dialect that's not actual XML shows that the only hope is to build valid tools and abstractions on top of all the crud.

> But having another XML dialect that's not actual XML…

HTML is based on SGML, it was never an XML dialect.

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

#257

Post by zackify » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

amccloud wrote: post #22

zackify wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all, nothing incompatible changes on the surface. There are more features and no breaking changes. It's mostly all under the hood! There will be new public api's to build your own custom rendering engine, ex how there is react-dom for browsers, react-native for mobile, and it will get easier to target new platforms thanks to fiber.

For those who have side-effects in their component lifecycle methods might have some problems when they turn on async fibers.

This will not be default until React 17 I believe.

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

#258

Post by justsee » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 2:33 AM UTC

xmatos wrote: post #234

paganel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amen! React might be the best tool for building hybrid mobile or even cross platform electron apps, but the truth is, it suck balls for web development. Bundling the entire website inside a single js file, that needs to be re-downloaded everytime you add a div or change a single css class is stupid, sorry. Your website doesn't need to be pure text. It can be beautiful, modern and responsive. And it doesn't need much…

React is great for web development (using Next.js) based on my recent experience.

Citing only one side of any architectural trade-offs isn't particularly interesting either. The other side is that we can now easily build sites using Universal JS (serverside-rendered combined with SPA).

Delivering a website with seemingly instantaneous repaints even on flaky internet connections is just a superior end-user experience.

Just click through the primary nav of a Universal JS site vs an old-school one, and it feels like we've been putting up with the equivalent of the old 300 ms tap delay, but for all websites and website links.

Not engineering away that latency penalty will tend towards foolish for website properties that want to remain competitive.

Users will become increasingly accustomed to very responsive sites and the latency penalty that is currently normalised will become more glaring and unacceptable.

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

#259

Post by ajross » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 2:37 AM UTC

acjohnson55 wrote: post #144

paganel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A web limited to textual content is a pretty quaint and uninspiring vision, IMO. The web started that way because static documents are relatively easy to represent, but the future (and present, for that matter) is rich experiences that can be distributed in the same way. But there are many steps left to get there, so either buckle up and help build that future, or get used to an ever-shrinking ecosystem of the purely…

> Sure, it's bewildering right now, but in the future, this will all be knit together in a cohesive way.

Could have said those same words literally a decade ago when we were all struggling to figure out all this Rails and MVC stuff and how automated ORMs worked above MySQL. Seven or eight paradigm shifts later, we're all still confused and I see no cohesive knitting.

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

#260

Post by mirsadm » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 2:41 AM UTC

chillacy wrote: post #206

mirsadm wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may be robust but the user experience still sucks. JS heavy web sites are unresponsive and turn my 3 year old MBP into a vacuum cleaner. Facebook is the best example. I can barely load the web site without the fans spinning. Firefox can't handle it at all. It is unusable for me.

Might be more Firefox than your macbook or the web. I've noticed (while developing an extension) that Firefox feels noticeably more sluggish than Chrome. Safari somehow feels even faster than Chrome, but I'm too tied to the extension ecosystem of Chrome to switch.

Firefox is definitely partly to blame. Chrome does work better and Safari is probably the best of the lot.