So, its React with the sharp edges smoothed away. Interesting. I am not a web developer, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but can someone tell me, if you decided to use Solid.js as opposed to React, can you still make use of all the 3rd party React UI frameworks out there? Is it compatible with React in that sense?
Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
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Re: Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
#82This article hits on something I've felt for a long time. The idea that "hooks are superior" to me is ridiculous. If a linter is required to tell me when I'm writing a bug that is not immediately obvious, that is a failing in the framework to round those edges. Lints are not rounded edges!
Solid is nice and _seems_ to fix the issues with hooks, but as another comment mentioned, the challenge is with building at scale. It's unclear to me how this scales and where the sharp edges are.
React IMO trades off performance in exchange for ergonomics. These ergonomics bear fruit early on, but you start dealing with this debt very quickly. As "nice" as Redux is, I shouldn't need it so early. React is designed in a way that results in pretty terrible performance. I once wrote a React app, and discovered perf issues 2 weeks in. Any UI framework I used in the past would have scaled beyond this point without having to have the data layer rewritten. Frameworks of the past also had what seemed like way less "magic".
I totally accept that it's seriously nice to write, but how many trees has React alone burnt?
Re: Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
#83No post body was provided.
Re: Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
#84This is the same code in Svelte.js
# Counter.svelte
let count= 0
setInterval(() => {
count += 1
}, 1000)The count is: {count}
Re: Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
#85So, its React with the sharp edges smoothed away. Interesting. I am not a web developer, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but can someone tell me, if you decided to use Solid.js as opposed to React, can you still make use of all the 3rd party React UI frameworks out there? Is it compatible with React in that sense?
Unfortunately, you cannot use React code inside Solidjs[1] so you cannot make use of the huge ecosystem of react UI components/libraries. It isn't compatible in that sense. However, there is an "official" option[2] for including Solidjs code inside React.
[1]: https://www.solidjs.com/guides/faq#is-there-react-compat%2C-or-some-way-to-use-my-react-libraries-in-solid%3F
[2]: https://github.com/solidjs/react-solid-stateRe: Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just iteration on the awesome groundwork that React laid, and shows that things can still be much better. React has some very peculiar patterns that don't really jive well with javascript as a language, or its ecosystem. If the setInterval example is fundamentally against what React is, then IMO that really hammers the point the author is making. I have a few React projects under my belt, and often times stil…
In my personal opinion when there is a lot of complicated state in a component and there is no real benefit to splitting it up into smaller components then hooks are inferior to the older lifecycle methods (in creating understandable, maintainable code), however in my experience whenever I come to place nowadays this would be considered heresy and everything needs to be in hooks even if you have 10+ and growing numbe…
“Long lists of generic hooks” is a symptom of devs not having climbed the difficulty curve a bit further, to where they are writing custom hooks, and using fewer in each component, IMO.
It’s understandable to stumble into this difficulty though, and a bit of deceptive marketing on the part of the hooks folks. They should be upfront that using hooks well in a real app requires a lot of careful thinking of the kind that many “typical” programmers do not have much practice in, and then the maintenance of whatever code comes from the effort. The functional-programming-mindshare situation seems to be improving slowly, but still.
Re: Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
#87This article hits on something I've felt for a long time. The idea that "hooks are superior" to me is ridiculous. If a linter is required to tell me when I'm writing a bug that is not immediately obvious, that is a failing in the framework to round those edges. Lints are not rounded edges! Solid is nice and _seems_ to fix the issues with hooks, but as another comment mentioned, the challenge is with building at scale…
React would work well as a compiled to metal language. Instead we end up with React on Typescript on ES6 on ES5 on the browser that still only has one language targetable. We're shackled to a rocketship in motion desperately monkey patching the engines.
Re: Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
#88I've used React for ~3 years, primarily with function components and hooks. I think that hooks were a wonderful addition and I think the framework has made smart choices with checking object equality to decided if components re-render. That said, I think that easily the most difficult aspects of react revolve around how re-renders are triggered. Maintaining referential equality to stop unnecessary renders gets tricky…
Agreed, after 6 years of use, my gripes with React come down to the re-rendering and lack of syntactic sugar for commonly used things. Hooks can get messy, but complicated components were complicated even with the class syntax.
What React has going for it, is that it is predictable. That is an extremely important part of any tool.
Re: Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
#89This is the same code in Svelte.js # Counter.svelte let count= 0 setInterval(() => { count += 1 }, 1000) The count is: {count}
What does a reusable (ie import from another file) `useAutoCounter` look like in Svelte?
Re: Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feels like we're trading complexity here for complexity there, and it seems impossible to judge which way is actually "better". I use loops in React all the time but only have used `setInterval` in a component a handful of times..
We are not trading some complexity here for some complexity there. We are trading a huge amount of complexity for a framework that is simpler by an order of magnitude. Simplicity is one of the really undeniable benefits of Solid once you gain a decent understanding of the framework. React at times might appear simple on the surface but the overall complexity is pretty huge compared to Solid.
I feel like if it were actually an order of magnitude less complex, it would be eminently obvious from a blog post about it? Maybe I'm just tired and don't "see it" for whatever reason, or maybe I need to find some better examples.
From the moment I saw a post about immer.js, I was sold because it seemed like an obviously better solution for the vast majority of cases where I would otherwise grab Immutable.js, a library that I wanted to like but inevitably struggled against.
This.. isn't quite as revelatory. I'm not saying it's not all that you claim it is, it's just that from a glance, I don't see how this somewhat different approach addresses the problems I run into often with React in a major way (beyond the claimed performance boost).