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If not React, then what?

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Re: If not React, then what?

#211

Post by ToucanLoucan »

johnfn wrote: post #207
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

Is it? On Hacker News it probably is, and I agree that it can drive engineers nuts to know that apps are more bloated than they have to be, but I think we’re a relatively small percentage of the population. Among my less technically/inclined friends and family I haven’t heard one complaint about, say, Spotify being slow, and certainly never any complaints about its size.

They don't say "I'm sick of React websites," they just say "Wow websites are getting slower and slower." or they complain about specific tabs or just the browser in general sucking up tons of RAM and CPU.

Re: If not React, then what?

#212

Post by YetAnotherNick »

icedchai wrote: post #194

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.

No need to miss jquery days. If you want jquery you can use it now. I know at least some companies use it even for greenfield projects.

Re: If not React, then what?

#213

Post by davedx »

lopatin wrote: post #143

I'll continue using vanilla React, for the same reason I use Java: it's reached the coveted "boring technology" status where it's mature, stable, fast enough, and has a huge community, resources, and ecosystem. I won't let go of that easily. However, this is a pretty epic rant nonetheless.

Amen. I adopted react for the first time in around 2014. It’s now “boring” and various predictable groups of people are desperate to replace it with /something/, while I’m getting on with my job of delivering software using a nice set of reasonably standardized tools, not having problems hiring, and just generally enjoying life.

Long may the reign of typescript, nodejs and react continue.

Re: If not React, then what?

#214

Post by no_wizard »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #211
johnfn wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? On Hacker News it probably is, and I agree that it can drive engineers nuts to know that apps are more bloated than they have to be, but I think we’re a relatively small percentage of the population. Among my less technically/inclined friends and family I haven’t heard one complaint about, say, Spotify being slow, and certainly never any complaints about its size.

They don't say "I'm sick of React websites," they just say "Wow websites are getting slower and slower." or they complain about specific tabs or just the browser in general sucking up tons of RAM and CPU.

I’m also aware they won’t make the direct references and I’m willing to bet the OP is too.

There are very few instances I can think of for the last 4 years where I heard anyone complaining like this about the general state of these things. There’s a few offenders I can think of, like Salesforce, but I haven’t heard from any non technical users especially about things like Gmail being slow or their browsers being too slow.

Whet I often hear instead to be honest is people widely seem surprised when they have 200 tabs open in Chrome and everything still feels fast to them

That’s not to say performance isn’t important, it really is, in fact I’m the performance czar where I work, I spend along time on optimizations and performance.

However the acceptable performance threshold is dependent on the activity more than anything I’ve found. That’s why it’s such a big deal in e-commerce but people don’t seem to care as much for longer lived apps, otherwise Jira might actually be snappy

Now of course there is a threshold regardless of app where it will things negatively, losing customers etc. and thus it shouldn’t be ignore either

Re: If not React, then what?

#215

Post by chimpanzee »

danjl wrote: post #176
chimpanzee wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Being the most popular comes with big benefits. There are far more articles about how to support issues that you run into, and many more libraries available for your use. While other libraries maybe "better"in some cases, giving up the support of the large community is a big cost.

No argument there. But “better at” implies something inherent to React’s design rather than to its community.

Re: If not React, then what?

#216

Post by yurishimo »

flimsypremise wrote: post #134

I don't think the author of this article actually understands the pressures that increasingly drive all frontend development into javascript frameworks, but those pressures are actually very straightforward: • A large portion of the cost of maintaining a code repository goes toward maintaining the build. • Multiple builds per repo create significant costs. • Any web application with a UI _requires_ a frontend build f…

He works (worked?) for Google. I think he knows what it takes to build a site on a large team and the trade-offs.

Re: If not React, then what?

#217

Post by riku_iki »

quantadev wrote: post #117
cyann wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Angluar -> I'm using this from now on

In case I was unclear, I consider Angular dead and obsolete.

> In case I was unclear, I consider Angular dead and obsolete.

maybe you would expand on this? I have no intention to challenge you, just genuinely curios if and why I should consider vue over agnular for new project (I use angular already).

Re: If not React, then what?

#218

Post by chimpanzee »

mdaniel wrote: post #200
chimpanzee wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Care to be specific? Is it the documentation you don’t like? Is it the example application’s design you don’t like? Or is it something about Mithril itself?

Re: If not React, then what?

#219

Post by em-bee »

dottjt wrote: post #35
QuiDortDine wrote: post #7

WOW this is a long article! Still waiting for the substance though... The only point I can agree with is that React is stupidly hard to learn. It feels like a tool made for aliens, though once you master it, it can be pretty efficient. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the JS-free web isn't coming back. And if you're using modern JS, you might as well use React (or a similar tool). The user won't be able to tel…

As someone who's been doing React since the beginning, I would agree that it's hard starting out. However, I think any new paradigm is difficult starting out. Recently I've been learning OO for work and I've been finding it stupidly hard and entirely unintuitive.

what do you mean by learning OO here? javascript is OO too, so you have already been doing OO, as far as i understand it and what you are learning is something different. and now i am curious what that is.

Re: If not React, then what?

#220

Post by openrisk »

The overall landscape for developing applications is a mess but this article does not help much with clearing it up.

One reason for the mess seems to me is the coexistence of many paradigms for achieving similar functionality (for example you can draw many different boundaries between client and server).

Combine this with the many distinct use cases (form factors, application types etc.) and the various non-interoperable platforms and you have a serious combinatorial optimization problem.

Depending on what one wants to do there might be a sweet spot of the 80%/20% type. Alpine.js seems to one such, which if it was developed many years ago it may have saved a lot of wasted complexity.

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