React chaos in mid and large web apps: Any different experiences?
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Re: React chaos in mid and large web apps: Any different experiences?
#2[flagged]
Re: React chaos in mid and large web apps: Any different experiences?
#3[flagged]
The trash comments are very flame-baity but the underlying assertion is true that it’s been a long time since it was “the obvious choice”.
One of the somewhat ironic things that I don’t know is well understood within the React community is that just purely by the nature of its particular architectural details, it’s only going to continue to become and worse and worse choice as time goes on.
What started as its main selling point (an abstraction over the messy parts of web standards at the time) has actually become one of its biggest liabilities.
It was fundamentally designed around solving problems that just haven’t been problems for some time now and much better options do indeed exist.
That’s to say absolutely nothing of how it has since been hijacked by a for profit VC backed company who are just making everything worse and more complicated with more lock in.
Now is a good time to start looking for the exits. I don’t think having it as the default for a new project in 2024 is a good idea either.
Re: React chaos in mid and large web apps: Any different experiences?
#4[flagged]
Which options do you mean!?
Re: React chaos in mid and large web apps: Any different experiences?
#5The whole argument about Angular ten years ago was the learning curve. I’m on a project now using React with Next and find the code so difficult to read or reason about.
Re: React chaos in mid and large web apps: Any different experiences?
#6I've encountered all the issue listed in the post. The worst for me is redundant (overdetermined) state, that is, when a state variable is actually derivable from other state variables. It's pointless, confusing, and broadens the space of possible states, including impossible and inconsistent ones.
Re: React chaos in mid and large web apps: Any different experiences?
#7Strongly recommend React-query (now Tanstack Query). ~50% of those useEffect and useState hooks are simply loading data or tracking loading states, mutation state, etc. This really improves with Tanstack Query.
Even better is to get Tanstack Query for free with type-safe backend in T3 stack.
Hard to overstate how much the symptoms described in this thread can improve simply from this.
Re: React chaos in mid and large web apps: Any different experiences?
#8I find working with React and Mobx a breeze, also for complex apps. Not sure, why this has not been more widely adopted. It eliminates usually the need to use those mentioned unintuitive and error prone state handling mechanisms.
Re: React chaos in mid and large web apps: Any different experiences?
#9> "useEffect" [...] this function is absolutely not intuitive
100%. I've found `useEffect` is an effective foot-shotgun, even I still blast away some toes with it. What makes it some weird to me from the start (React 16.8, ~2019) is how they folded several, clearly named, lifecycle methods into this one callback. The motivation for this change [1] informs me that maybe I've just never worked on Facebook-scale front-ends or I've just forgotten the pain of explicitly having to write all those methods, but I rather liked their separation.
[1]: https://legacy.reactjs.org/docs/hooks-intro.html#complex-com...
Re: React chaos in mid and large web apps: Any different experiences?
#10I find working with React and Mobx a breeze, also for complex apps. Not sure, why this has not been more widely adopted. It eliminates usually the need to use those mentioned unintuitive and error prone state handling mechanisms.
So much this. It's a perfect match for React. Let's you keep data/logic out of the components, 0 boilerplate, optimized renders (similar to what react compiler will do...).
You can even use tanstack-query to get all/most of its benefits. (by using its core package instead of react-query)