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If not React, then what?

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Re: If not React, then what?

#401

Post by yawaramin »

photonthug wrote: post #76
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you try something for a decade and it doesn't work, maybe a change in style is necessary! An article exceeding 20 pages doesn't sound like the best persuasion strategy.

I’m not a front end engineer and I read most of this, at first for sheer morbid curiosity about the drama, then I kept reading because it looked like deep knowledge and detailed exposition of a complex subject, then I kept reading because I was wondering who listens to a guy like this and why? In my experience, regardless of your skill at communication, coworkers or bosses that are actually interested in getting to d…

Good point, but you should take a look at a post where he does exactly this: https://infrequently.org/2024/08/object-lesson/

Re: If not React, then what?

#402

Post by ToucanLoucan »

tekla wrote: post #372
no_wizard wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then you are in a bubble. I was recently asked by my elderly parents why they are paying for 5g internet when the internet resources they use are so slow, slower than what they remember from 1997. They ask me to call our ISP because it makes no sense that the sites they have used for decades feel so slow All I could say was that there was nothing I could do.

Every time I use Facebook (which isn't many but still) I am re-shocked at how fucking SLOW it is. How many times I end up refreshing the page because some damn thing didn't connect quick enough, or maybe too quick and it wasn't ready, I'm not sure.

YouTube is also great for this, like, 1/50 navigation clicks just results in a blank page with no error message. Ctrl-R to the rescue.

Or the number of times Reddit's infinite scroll just... dies. Somewhere in the background, I don't know where.

Like I can't think of any of these major platform websites where shit isn't just constantly tripping over it's own dick and breaking in often humorous but also just ridiculous ways.

Re: If not React, then what?

#403

Post by godot »

harrall wrote: post #297

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 unse…

I was going to write a counter argument that codebases using earlier versions of React did not look nice, and that they only started to look nice when React moved to Hooks and functional components.

But I realized that actually supports your argument. React with Hooks and functional components unseated old school React.

Re: If not React, then what?

#404

Post by ramones13 »

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…

To your third point - the author would recommend doing research and prototyping with all the options you might consider based on your use-cases. He actively avoids being prescriptive in generic contexts like this because he wants to avoid arbitrary dogmatic solutions (like React tends to be).

Source: I work closely with him and have been frustrated with this stance until I saw people using Next and Remix for things like landing or contact pages.

Re: If not React, then what?

#405

Post by leptons »

johnfn wrote: post #311
afavour wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> React performance concerns in the real world are typically measured in, at worst, hundreds of milliseconds. I disagree. Try loading up a library heavy site (i.e. React plus a half dozen associated helpers for state, UI and whatever, which is pretty common) on an old or cheap Android device. It can take multiple seconds before the page is fully loaded. Even once the libraries are loaded, React sites often involve pa…

> I disagree. Try loading up a library heavy site (i.e. React plus a half dozen associated helpers for state, UI and whatever, which is pretty common) on an old or cheap Android device. It can take multiple seconds before the page is fully loaded. Even once the libraries are loaded, React sites often involve parsing a giant lump of JSON before you can do anything, that’s particularly CPU intensive and takes time on l…

API requests at page-load are definitely going to lower the page speed score. No API requests should happen at all, ideally, and all script and CSS to render everything "above the fold" should be loaded in-line. Nothing that is visible "below the fold" should ever run or load until the page is scrolled down by the site visitor. Only the bare-minimum script parsing that is required for the content "above the fold" should happen. Sure you can load scripts in-line for stuff below the fold, but make sure it doesn't actually get parsed by the browser until that feature is likely to be visible on the screen.

It doesn't matter what library or framework is used - even jQuery can score 100% page speeds on Google Lighthouse. It really only depends on following every single nitpicky thing that Google Lighthouse recommends, and finding a solution for it. I took a site (actually a few thousand sites) that was scoring about 5 to 35 out of 100 on Google Lighthouse (depending on the customiztions), up to 100/100 on Google Lighthouse. It took a lot of work, but the clients are happy now.

Where React doesn't do well is with lots of DOM elements. In another project I created a complex web application that had about 3000 div elements with drag-and-drop interface and all kinds of stuff going on. Well React couldn't handle it. The browser started crashing due to memory issues if the page was open longer than 20 minutes or so, it slowed to a crawl and eventually froze. I ended up switching that one component to a canvas based solution (Konva) and it solved the problem completely. I still use React for all the other simple UI stuff, but I learned my lesson about what React is really good at and what it's not.

Re: If not React, then what?

#406

Post by rkagerer »

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…

I hate what "modern" web development has done to my UI experience.

Eg. There's a delay between an Amazon.ca results page loading and it populating the search text box with the phrase you just searched for. As a result when I do two searches in rapid succession, it consistently interrupts my typing at exactly the right time to batter in incomprehensible text.

AirCanada and WestJet are two other websites that became awful to use after adopting React-ey style UI's.

Re: If not React, then what?

#407

Post by darkerside »

harrall wrote: post #297

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 unse…

I actually think the more powerful factor was that React and jQuery before it were easy to pick up and start integrating without a lot of fuss. You don't need to build a dedicated website, you can just start incorporating these libraries into your existing stuff. Compare to Angular which basically demanded a rewrite to start using it.

For similar reasons, I thought Vue.js would win over React, but it's starting to seem I was wrong.

Re: If not React, then what?

#408

Post by kccqzy »

rkagerer wrote: post #406
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…

I hate what "modern" web development has done to my UI experience. Eg. There's a delay between an Amazon.ca results page loading and it populating the search text box with the phrase you just searched for. As a result when I do two searches in rapid succession, it consistently interrupts my typing at exactly the right time to batter in incomprehensible text. AirCanada and WestJet are two other websites that became aw…

There's no React-ey style UI. Seriously. It's a UI framework not a collection of prebuilt UI components. You cannot tell if a site is using React or not without opening dev tools.

Re: If not React, then what?

#409

Post by afavour »

wokwokwok wrote: post #387
afavour wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many sites have a two tier application with a CMS SEO “landing page” abd conversion funnel run by the marketing department and a user-login that takes you to a separate website that is SEO irrelevant. So… a site that doesnt care about SEO and is not indexed and is purely for logged in users is also very common.

I don’t really understand the disagreement here. I didn’t claim those sites are rare. I was specifically refuting the OPs claim that page load time only matters in a small number of specialized domains. I am saying it is very common for it to matter. It’s also very common for it to not matter, you’ll get no argument from me there.

Re: If not React, then what?

#410

Post by lihaoyi »

yawaramin wrote: post #394
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…

You should check out htmx. It goes really well with ScalaTags :-)

ScalaRx and Scalatags actually works a lot like React.js, in user-facing experience even if not in implementation. Unfortunately I was just a college kid and couldn't push it the same way the pros at Facebook could push react!
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