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Next.js is infuriating

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Re: Next.js is infuriating

#11

Post by thiago_fm »

Similar to Meteor.js, they've tried to abstract things that aren't really abstractable (is this even a word?).

It handles edge-cases extremely poorly, and when you have those scenarios, you either need to find a workaround (so code becomes ugly and painful to maintain) or give up.

I've worked with it for a project, gladly never again.

I'll extend my feedback about Node.JS backend. Look how many flavors: deno, bun... It's a mess.

Node.js a terrible platform for server-side in comparison to Java/C#(performance/stability) & Ruby/Python(dev speed).

The only reason it is successful is that everybody knows JS/TS. But just because everybody knows it is rarely a reason to use it.

The event loop is quite nice and easy to reason about, but that's all there's to it. It is single-threaded and comes with gotchas, with at the end being in my opinion a negative aspect of it.

Many other langs/platforms offer also an event loop for concurrency, but they aren't often used. In the end no matter how much we hate threads, they serve a great purpose that has been battle-tested for so many decades.

Unfortunately companies adopt programming languages based on hype and trends, rather than technical reasons.

Until when we will have people hyped up about writing web servers in CSS, even though it doesn't make any sense to?

TLDR: It isn't only Next.JS, but the whole NodeJS thing isn't that great.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#12

Post by b_e_n_t_o_n »

usernamed7 wrote: post #9

as a Rails dev this makes me LOL. I would have expected the rube goldburg machine of JS frameworks to be more robust and ergonomic by now, but it looks more to be hacks built on top of hacks with no real vision or technical leadership.

Like said in the article, most other JS frameworks are actually pretty good these days.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#13

Post by ollysb »

When they transitioned to the app router it was like they'd given some bootcamp graduates a crack at "improving" on the express apis - which are mature and roughly align with the composable russion doll approach taken in servlets, rack, plug and any other server interface I've ever seen.

Aside from the abysmal middleware api you also have the dubious decision to replace having a request parameter with global functions like cookies() and headers().

Perhaps there is some underlying design constraint that I'm missing where all of these decisions make sense but it really does look like they threw out every hard fought lesson and decided to make every mistake again.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#14

Post by solatic »

Half these issues stem from a relative misunderstanding of exactly where the code is running. Next.js has layers upon layers upon layers due to the interplay between the browser, middleware, edge vs. node, SSR... It's an enormous amount of complexity and it really only fits under the following set of circumstances:

  * You sell a B2C product to a potentially global audience, so edge semantics actually help with latency issues
  * You're willing to pay Vercel a high premium for them to host
  * You have no need for background task processing (Vercel directs you to marketplace/partner services), so your architecture never pushes you to host on another provider.
Otherwise, just tread the well-trod path and stick to either a react-vite SPA or something like Rails doing ordinary SSR.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#15

Post by thiago_fm »

usernamed7 wrote: post #9

as a Rails dev this makes me LOL. I would have expected the rube goldburg machine of JS frameworks to be more robust and ergonomic by now, but it looks more to be hacks built on top of hacks with no real vision or technical leadership.

Yet 95% of fresh companies raising funds use that cursed NextJS framework.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#17

Post by palmfacehn »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #4

It really is. I am a staunch react defender, I work with it daily and I found the change from class components to hooks to be a better programming model. But whenever I work with Next, I feel like we lost the plot somewhere. I try a lot of frameworks and I like esoteric programming languages, but somehow Next.js, the frontier JavaScript framework embraced by React is the only experience where half the time, I have no…

I'm not a React or Next.js user. Others will disagree, but personally I prefer to minimize my exposure to JS by decorating traditional HTML+CSS documents with vanilla JS as needed.

I was somewhat surprised when I noticed simple Next.js landing pages would break in Firefox. Worse yet, the failure mode was to overlay all of the content with a black screen and white text, "An application client side error has occurred". It was surprising in that a simple landing page couldn't render, but when I discovered that the cause was a JS frontend framework, I felt that it was par for the course.

Perhaps it makes sense to the advocates, but for those of us not on the bandwagon, it can be sincerely baffling.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#18

Post by bob1029 »

pjmlp wrote: post #2

I don't get these kind of complaints, coming from Java and .NET web frameworks, Next,js is the only sane frontend framework followed by Angular. Saying this as someone doing Web related development since 1998, glory days of Perl and CGIs.

Angular is absolutely not a sane framework. I'd argue it used to be, but you can't build trust in anything after being rugpulled with 4+ major breaking refactors over the years. If you get it that wrong that many times, I start to wonder what the actual purpose of the framework is.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#19

Post by zwnow »

b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #12
usernamed7 wrote: post #9

as a Rails dev this makes me LOL. I would have expected the rube goldburg machine of JS frameworks to be more robust and ergonomic by now, but it looks more to be hacks built on top of hacks with no real vision or technical leadership.

Like said in the article, most other JS frameworks are actually pretty good these days.

I work with Vue 2 and Vue 3, both options and composition APIs and both are pretty great. I dont know how it's like for very complex UI but it 100% fulfills my needs.

Also shout out to Pinia, I love you!

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#20

Post by vendiddy »

solatic wrote: post #14

Half these issues stem from a relative misunderstanding of exactly where the code is running. Next.js has layers upon layers upon layers due to the interplay between the browser, middleware, edge vs. node, SSR... It's an enormous amount of complexity and it really only fits under the following set of circumstances: * You sell a B2C product to a potentially global audience, so edge semantics actually help with latency…

And even if you fall under the first category, I find it hard to believe that the performance bottleneck is solved by using Vercel and SSR.

With all the other crazy shit people are doing (multi-megabyte bundle sizes, slow API calls with dozens of round-trips to the DB, etc) doing the basics of profiling, optimizing, simplifying seems like it'd get you much further than changing to a more complex architecture.

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