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If not React, then what?

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Re: If not React, then what?

#291

Post by LtWorf »

phailhaus wrote: post #221
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…

> because it's fucking absurd to me that I need a (then anyway) 700 MB app to stream music. You only know that factoid because you're an engineer and you looked it up. Users have absolutely no clue, and literally do not care.

Phones are literally sold at different prices when they have more storage. People are familiar with being unable to install more apps or take more pictures. Happens all the time.

Get out of your bubble.

Re: If not React, then what?

#292

Post by hasanhaja »

lihaoyi wrote: post #243

The fundamental magic of react is that it lets you write code that renders O(n) UI states in a functional manner (i.e. by returning the HTML you want) rather than O(n^2) UI state transitions in a mutable manner (by mutating the page via nested callbacks), and somehow makes it kind of fast-ish People love complaining about React, but I don't know if they remember the pre-React world where you had to write the code to…

How are you getting to O(n)? Is that in terms of the logic you need to read and keep in your mind? Or is it the actual computational complexity?

Re: If not React, then what?

#293

Post by andrewaylett »

hasanhaja wrote: post #241
ht85 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing is that almost every complaint I see about React (except bundle size maybe, but who cares?) exists in the APP context. If your use case is a simple website, React is just a nice templating lib and you won't need to use any of the things people generally dislike about it. That AND your experience when you inevitably have to add some interactivity is going to be 100x better than vanilla JS. As for the bui…

> is just a nice templating lib Are these templates only used on the server-side to generate the HTML upfront? Or is it being generated on the client? > experience when you inevitably have to add some interactivity is going to be 100x better than vanilla JS I don't believe this can quantified. How are you measuring DX improvements? Are you also able to continue to measure these improvements as your application/codeba…

It's certainly possible to generate the HTML up-front. Tooling like Next.js even sets things up so it's easier to render the HTML for the first page load on the server than to push it to the client.

I have a website. It's not great, it doesn't get much traffic, but it's mine :). If you disable JS, it works: links are links, HTML is loaded for each page view. If you enable JS, it still works: links will trigger a re-render, the address bar updates, all the nice "website" stuff.

If I write enough (and people read enough) then enabling JS also brings performance benefits: yes, you have to load ~100kB of JS. But each page load is 4kB smaller because it doesn't contain any boilerplate.

Obviously I could generate the HTML any way I choose, but doing it in React is nice and composable.

Re: If not React, then what?

#294

Post by baobabKoodaa »

floydnoel wrote: post #139
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have trouble imagining, here's one such project: https://github.com/baobabKoodaa/ouija

I have a lot of "framework free" single-developer projects as well (such as https://bongo.to ), but that isn't really what I think we are talking about here. Single developer projects can do whatever they want, it isn't a problem. The problem comes when you have to work with distributed teams, juniors, etc. One way or another a large team still has to come to agreements about how to do things, and without an external…

The goalposts just keep moving...

The claim upthread was that you couldn't make a web app at all without a framework ("or it would just be a document"). I said yes you can and the goalposts shifted to: sure, but only "brochure-ware" (referring to simple unambitious projects). I show an ambitious interactive project made without a framework and now the goalposts are moving to: sure, but large distributed teams couldn't work like this? You know, this solo project is more ambitious than 99% of the projects I work on at my actual work. You know, projects that have 10, 40, or 100 devs working on it.

Re: If not React, then what?

#295

Post by halflife »

quantadev wrote: post #235
riku_iki wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Maybe Angular is still used a lot, in legacy projects. I just mean for starting a new project, imo most people will choose React or Vue in 2024, right? I never used Angular myself, but have used both React and Vue a lot.

If you’ve never used it don’t declare it dead. Angular is updated regularly every 6 months. While react is busy thinking how to create more SSR apis, the angular team keeps improving developer experience.

IMO right now it’s easier to start an angular project with much less foot guns than react.

Re: If not React, then what?

#296

Post by Scarblac »

afavour wrote: post #250
michaelcampbell wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reacting to assertions of broad averages with specific counter examples doesn't necessarily invalidate their point.

OK, let me restate something from my previous component explicitly: a site that’s concerned with SEO is not a “specialized domain”. It is very, very common.

So are web applications that are completely behind auth and never need to care about SEO.

They're quite different and it's a shame they're usually mixed up in these discussions.

Re: If not React, then what?

#297

Post by harrall »

I've been building sites since the 2000s and I'll let you know why React or jQuery "won."

It's because when you write code using these libraries, your code looks nice.

I cannot say that for a LOT of libraries, especially MOST frameworks. Sorry for calling AngularJS out but look at a code sample from early Angular: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42823436/angularjs-error... (It looks terrible.)

React will be unseated like jQuery got unseated when someone makes something that looks nicer. Every time you write a library (or even API at work), make sure to look at your code samples and you better be 100% be able to say "this is pretty."

Re: If not React, then what?

#298

Post by lopatin »

hmeh wrote: post #266
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.

Have you heard of HTML, CSS and forms? They are even more boring, more mature, more stable, often faster, have a huge community, massive resources and ecosystem. React is even built on one of these technologies!

Which one of these technologies is React built on top of?

Re: If not React, then what?

#300

Post by hasanhaja »

qudat wrote: post #227
johnfn wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of what you said. As a minor nit, my understanding is that you call into a library, whereas a framework calls into you. Since React typically does most of the calling into my components I think it’s fair enough to call it a framework.

That’s a nice description but it is not perfect. React does one thing well: view = func(state) It doesn’t have a great story for virtually anything outside of that single function which means for many large apps it is never enough.

But most people don't use it for the only thing it does well and pick appropriate approaches for the other parts; they use it for everything and this has transpired into the reinventing of browser mechanisms like CSS in user land. This is the real problem. Not the tool "React" (or others like it) but the cult that vehemently denies their bets were wrong and doesn't take responsibility for the real damage it's caused.
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