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React I love you, but you're bringing me down

marmelab.com

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Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#331

Post by molszanski »

zero_shift wrote: post #178
molszanski wrote: post #149

Hmm… let me be frank about my experiences with React. I’ve been using React heavily for far over 6 or 7 years. React is amazing. And what I see is that people find so many ways to shoot themselves in the foot. At the same time, I understand that batteries-not-included approach will lead to that result. First of all, people get out of their skin and try to make it a complicated and entangled mess. In programming, ther…

I think this is a variation of Jevon's Paradox. The more power we give to developers - by simplifying, abstracting, optimising - the more they want to achieve, the faster they want to do it, the less effort they want to spend. Which puts them right back in the position of working under complexity. The reason people are now complaining about React is that React made writing 2015 webapps extremely easy. The result was…

I agree. Thanks for pointing it out! Great observation!

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#332

Post by WHATDOESIT »

pier25 wrote: post #328
WHATDOESIT wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to what? Vue is slower and Angular too. Perhaps Svelte might be faster but the programming paradigm is a little weird. Writing pure JS is bullshit - I tried it few months ago and even a very simple app - for public transport schedules - got very unmanageable very quickly. I'm currently working on a project with hundreds of reactive components shown at any given time (very extensive financial analytics/mode…

There are literally dozens of libs/frameworks faster than React. https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...

Lol, you really think someone is going to stray off the well-supported path for apps like these for 1-10% gain? This app shows a loading indicator quite a lot. Speed is important but nobody cares about raw speed this much. What we care about is a well-maintained library with significant ecosystem that's still going to be there in 2030 and it's super-easy to find devs and/or get help. The libs there are beta quality at best - maybe in few years.

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#333

Post by acemarke »

Rapzid wrote: post #307
acemarke wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it also only bales out during the DOM update phase; not during the calls to render() and then reconciliation(?) It's exactly the opposite. React splits work into two parts: the "render phase", where it loops over components and asks them to describe the UI they want (returning JSX/elements); and the "commit phase", where it has determined the changes that _need_ to happen to the DOM. The render phase is the part th…

Thanks for the correction and references. Sounds like a nightmare.

Not sure what you mean by "nightmare" - can you clarify?

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#334

Post by molszanski »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #204
pdntspa wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are good examples of clean, well-implemented React code by your definition? Because your comment perfectly encapsulates my experiences and frustrations in learning and using React off-and-on over the past 8 years or so. React is the one tech that really freaks me out because every time I have to dive into it, it's a completely different beast and it feels like so many people actually writing in React are just e…

> your comment perfectly encapsulates my experiences > feels like so many people actually writing in React are just effing CRAZY Same here. We had an experienced-but-batshit-crazy dev create a React site with approximately 250,000 LOC to support 3 forms with a max of 4 simple inputs and a 3-column data table view. To this day it makes my head spin how it is even theoretically possible to write that much code for so l…

Sweet pumpkins, I feel the pain. Architecture astronaut combined with a spaghetti aficionado. When one talks to people who have been around you hear amazing stories like that. thedailywtf material

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#335

Post by nightski »

engineeringwoke wrote: post #260
nightski wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be funny if it were true. Hooks were made for composable behavior for components.

How would Facebook convince the community to dogfood their new API without some marketing buzz? It's pretty obvious that V8 has trouble optimizing changes to object properties because of the design of the spec, and they were also pretty open about it in the blogs where hooks were introduced. I think it's also clear that useEffect is harder to grok than it's lifecycle equivalents, so there might be other things at pla…

I was just going off my own experience with React through the years. It was very hard to compose behavior with class based components. We had to create higher order components that had functions as children which could pass down data as arguments to the child function. It really made a mess of the component hierarchy. Now you can create reusable custom hooks that can be used from any component.

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#336

Post by blumomo »

Give react-admin [0], the post author’s react framework, a glimpse. If you develop an ERP/CRM like react app, you‘ve probably rebuilt parts of react-admin already, but you did it worse. Ah, and their source code is a breeze of fresh air.

[0] https://marmelab.com/react-admin/

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#337

Post by pdntspa »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #204
pdntspa wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are good examples of clean, well-implemented React code by your definition? Because your comment perfectly encapsulates my experiences and frustrations in learning and using React off-and-on over the past 8 years or so. React is the one tech that really freaks me out because every time I have to dive into it, it's a completely different beast and it feels like so many people actually writing in React are just e…

> your comment perfectly encapsulates my experiences > feels like so many people actually writing in React are just effing CRAZY Same here. We had an experienced-but-batshit-crazy dev create a React site with approximately 250,000 LOC to support 3 forms with a max of 4 simple inputs and a 3-column data table view. To this day it makes my head spin how it is even theoretically possible to write that much code for so l…

> We had an experienced-but-batshit-crazy dev create a React site with approximately 250,000 LOC to support 3 forms

Holy moly. I've seen some bloat but that takes the cake.

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#338

Post by FpUser »

dpweb wrote: post #239
corytheboyd wrote: post #190

I've worked in a few roughly-the-same-size (~50 engineers) web development shops. It's always the same. Doesn't matter if it's React, Angular, Class based components, Functional components with hooks, Just Some HTML, PHP, Rails views, etc. The frontend just collects the cruft of a product organization changing course very frequently. There are always a dozen half-finished fix-the-world ideas conflicting with each oth…

I'm trying to select a good framework and coming from long before react, having a tough time finding why shouldn't use just custom elements with no framework. Which is already built in. customElements.define('my-element', class MyElement extends HTMLElement { ... }) I can manage state within the component, app state in window.state. Coding up a simple reactivity is really pretty straight forward. Now, for this featur…

>"having a tough time finding why shouldn't use just custom elements with no framework"

This is exactly what I do on SPA front ends for many of my customers. Of course we use some libs but those have nothing in common with the frameworks, just narrowly scoped solutions. Saves gobbles of time and money.

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#339

Post by pfraze »

dpweb wrote: post #239
corytheboyd wrote: post #190

I've worked in a few roughly-the-same-size (~50 engineers) web development shops. It's always the same. Doesn't matter if it's React, Angular, Class based components, Functional components with hooks, Just Some HTML, PHP, Rails views, etc. The frontend just collects the cruft of a product organization changing course very frequently. There are always a dozen half-finished fix-the-world ideas conflicting with each oth…

I'm trying to select a good framework and coming from long before react, having a tough time finding why shouldn't use just custom elements with no framework. Which is already built in. customElements.define('my-element', class MyElement extends HTMLElement { ... }) I can manage state within the component, app state in window.state. Coding up a simple reactivity is really pretty straight forward. Now, for this featur…

I pursued this idea pretty aggressively for a while. What I found is that it was a wonderful fit for small projects, and then became a real drag as the scale/complexity grew, which led me to start thinking in terms of a budget-matching principle [1]

  1 https://paulfrazee.medium.com/building-on-budget-4b91b43d0357

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#340

Post by dragonwriter »

ghayes wrote: post #254
chrisco255 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only matters that the order not change dynamically between renders. This probably could have been avoided if react required a unique key per hook, but I think for brevity it's a decent trade-off.

For the life of me, I can't understand why they didn't go the route of "add an id to your hook." It would solve one of the two big gripes people have with hooks.

ids would be stuttering (especially for things like useMemo/useState), add a different source of error, and—if the goal was to make hooks compatible with flow control—probably create new categories of bugs that would be harder to catch in a linter or even with runtime checks like the existing “number of hooks cllaed changed” one.

Adding visual noise to enable subtle bugs may not be a win.

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