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If not React, then what?

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Re: If not React, then what?

#191

Post by Tronno »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #190
johnfn wrote: post #168

Reading over the authors primary reasons to not use React, they strike me as fundamentally misguided - mostly solving problems that most people don’t have. One reason it says that React is a poor choice is performance issues. But front end performance issues are almost never the most pressing issue to deal with. React performance concerns in the real world are typically measured in, at worst, hundreds of milliseconds…

>React performance concerns in the real world are typically measured in, at worst, hundreds of milliseconds. Yes, there are a few specialized domains where this will matter. No, you probably don’t work in one. Greater leverage can almost always be derived from improving the backend. Respectfully, I disagree on all of these points.

Care to elaborate?

Re: If not React, then what?

#192

Post by echelon »

johnfn wrote: post #168

Reading over the authors primary reasons to not use React, they strike me as fundamentally misguided - mostly solving problems that most people don’t have. One reason it says that React is a poor choice is performance issues. But front end performance issues are almost never the most pressing issue to deal with. React performance concerns in the real world are typically measured in, at worst, hundreds of milliseconds…

> React performance concerns in the real world are typically measured in, at worst, hundreds of milliseconds. Yes, there are a few specialized domains where this will matter. No, you probably don’t work in one.

This is fine for solving random business integration concerns, but for application software we have to use on a daily basis, it really sucks.

Modern web applications sometimes feel incredibly shitty to use. Gmail, YouTube, YouTube Music, Reddit, Twitter -- these are all bloated, hulking, beastly things.

I'm really hoping Rust becomes popular for specifically web application development. It'll need to overcome the awkward WASM/DOM bridge, but then it'll sing.

Heavy software that users spend hours within are where those hundreds of milliseconds per action really add up. We should be angry about anything worse than single digit milliseconds with these tools.

We need an engineering culture of excellence in these domains. Channel the Steve Jobs energy to say this isn't good enough.

Re: If not React, then what?

#193

Post by talkingtab »

I think almost any technology gets to the "this is stupid" point. Not it "was" stupid, but it is. We understand something so well, we know that despite being useful it is fundamentally flawed. This is not usually verbal knowing, but initially more from an intuition and understanding a pattern. I have used react, it was certainly a better choice than the alternatives. I like it. But it is now "stupid", at least for me. And why? Because my whole web paradigm has been changed by "mobile first". What is mobile, and here I am talking iPhone and "good" Android? It is a good processor with tiny screen and really good graphics processor. You can run pretty good games on many/most phones. So why not use that 3D technology instead of html, css? Or at least in addition to. If you play around for react-three/{fiber,drei} for a little bit it feels like you have burst out of a straitjacket.

I once was told to make a product "cool" and after struggling to understand what "cool" even meant, I came to an idea. Things are cool if they make it so you never see the world the same way again. react-three/{drei,fiber} and threejs are cool. [For example https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/getting-started/examples]

Re: If not React, then what?

#194

Post by icedchai »

I never liked React. I'm primarily a backend developer, and preferred server generated HTML with a sprinkling of Javascript. It may sound ridiculous to some, but I miss the JQuery days. For newer projects I'm looking at Elixir / Phoenix / LiveView and HTMX.

Re: If not React, then what?

#195

Post by Cotterzz »

valenterry wrote: post #8

> Frameworkism isn't delivering. Correct. The reason is not the frameworks but the languages. What is needed is a much more high-level and feature-powerful language. Just look at react. Passing down dependencies/values is a pain. So what did react do? It introduced contexts. Similar, other react addons try to solve this problem. But they all sacrifice type-safety in the process. They simply cannot solve this problem;…

This new language. Do you mean something that compiles down to JS like Typescript, Coffescript & Dart? Or a language that compiles to WASM like C, C++ or Rust?

Re: If not React, then what?

#196

Post by cyberax »

root_axis wrote: post #183
cyberax wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My constant problem with React-based tools is that they don't support deep links properly. You want to right-click on a product description to open it in a different tab to check later, and you can't. Even freaking Google (who really should know better) suffers from that. Amazon's retail frontend uses plain HTML, so it works fine.

I'm not sure how much experience you have with react, but it doesn't need to "support" links, they function exactly the same as with vanilla js, there's nothing about react that prevents their use. Using JavaScript for links is entirely a developer decision.

I'm familiar with React. And no, links in React often don't work without extra attention.

It's way too easy to put some state information into the context and then have your pages depend on it. For example, you have a page with a filter that is implemented via a simple state, and then a list of widgets that pass the filter. The widgets have a click handler that opens the widget details.

Now you right click on it. If you're lucky, it opens the widget details in a separate tab. However, the filter information is lost.

Re: If not React, then what?

#197

Post by wavemode »

claytongulick wrote: post #151
pier25 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not recent. We've had memes for years about React devs using divs with click events instead of using links.

What's the beef with clickable divs? Are you referring to just the case where they're misused for top level navigation? Or more generically? It's pretty common to not want the default behavior of an A tag, so instead of the e.preventDefault(); e.stopImmediatePropagation(); dance, a clickable div works great. Non deep-linked sub-nav (tabs, etc...) come to mind. Or maybe I'm hooked into a router and I need to pass some…

There's nothing wrong with clickable divs. The problem is using them in place of links.

If you're linking to something, then just use a link. So people get their accessibility/screenreader support, and you can still use JS to accomplish whatever other auxillary behavior you want.

Re: If not React, then what?

#198

Post by quantadev »

BeefWellington wrote: post #137
quantadev wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. That's precisely why full page reloads/updates every time some action is done (mouse click for example) would be completely unacceptable for most apps I've worked on. I've worked mostly on apps not websites.

The overwhelming majority of default HTML actions (no JS) that happen from a mouse click do not trigger a page load. You're trying to make it sound like selecting an item from a dropdown or selecting a textbox to enter text will cause a complete page load every time unless you use an SPA framework and that's just literally completely untrue. By your measure though, it sounds as though you'd be fine if these page load…

Static sites have their place in the world, for sure. But for large sophisticated apps where a mouse click might cause a state change that might update an unpredictable number of discreet individual visual changes throughout the entire page, that's where an SPA is needed. If you call this "absurd" it really shines more of a light on your own credibility than mine.

Re: If not React, then what?

#199

Post by ToucanLoucan »

johnfn wrote: post #168

Reading over the authors primary reasons to not use React, they strike me as fundamentally misguided - mostly solving problems that most people don’t have. One reason it says that React is a poor choice is performance issues. But front end performance issues are almost never the most pressing issue to deal with. React performance concerns in the real world are typically measured in, at worst, hundreds of milliseconds…

> But front end performance issues are almost never the most pressing issue to deal with.

Maybe not to you, but it's by far and away the biggest complaint with any website or app that uses React/Angular under the hood in my experience. On any computer older than a few years, the sheer amount of JavaScript being demanded to be run creates serious system bottlenecks.

This is literally why I cancelled Spotify, because it's fucking absurd to me that I need a (then anyway) 700 MB app to stream music.

Re: If not React, then what?

#200

Post by mdaniel »

chimpanzee wrote: post #162
eawgewag wrote: post #156

I honestly think this conversation gets overly complex because we fail to define the kind of websites we are talking about. These are my definitions, so I'll just share them upfront: - a web site -- which has low interactivity requirements. Blogs, documentation sites, etc, go here. A vast majority of websites are in this bucket - a web application -- which has high interactivity requirements. Things like Gmail, Linea…

> React is better at anything else at making [a web application] Mithril.js beats it in my opinion. I’m sure many developers would argue in favor of other libraries over React. React is simply the most popular.

I'm glad you like it, but https://mithril.js.org/simple-application.html is some "uh-huh, thanks but no"
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