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Next.js is infuriating

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Re: Next.js is infuriating

#291

Post by snickerdoodle12 »

a2tech wrote: post #256
zero_shift wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Next.js are that its rough edges are a feature, not a bug. Everything is geared towards you giving up and just using Vercel's hosting

Working with a client just last month that hired an African engineering group to build a tool for them. What they got delivered was a Next.js train wreck that was so coupled to Vercel's hosting that I couldn't make it run successfully anywhere else. The customer was a non-profit and didn't want to/couldn't afford Vercel's hosting so asked if I could try and make it run and I (naively) thought 'its just javascript, it…

Why accept the result? Send it back and have them deliver something usable.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#292

Post by throwaway77385 »

YuukiRey wrote: post #79

I 100% agree. I've ran into the same issues, and I would never use Next.js for anything, and I will encourage every team at work to use something else. In general Next.js has so many layers of abstraction that 99.9999% of projects don't need. And the ones that do are probably better off building a bespoke solution from lower level parts. Next.js is easily the worst technology I've ever used.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one thinking this. I built a medium-complexity, money-making, production-grade app in Next.js and started out on Vercel's hosting (and Google Firebase) and then moved to hosting myself and stripping out Firebase, replacing it with Pocketbase.

Pocketbase was the ONLY good thing about this journey. Everything else sucked just so terribly.

Infinite complexity everywhere, breaking changes CONSTANTLY, impenetrable documentation everywhere.

It is just so, so awful. If we rewound the last five years of FE trends and instead focused on teaching the stuff that existed at the time properly, we'd be in a much better position.

I've also built a very complex React frontend (few thousand users, pretty heavy visual computation required in many places). And while I don't particularly like React either, Next.js was even worse.

And lastly, built a CMS in Go, with vanilla JS. And while the DX sometimes feels lacking, I just can't help but feel that I actually know wtf is going to happen when I do something. Why is that so hard?

In React and Next.js I am STILL, AFTER SIX YEARS constantly guessing what might happen. Yes, I can fix just about anything these frameworks throw at me, thanks to all the experience I've gathered about their quirks, but it all just feels to messy and badly designed.

In Go, the last time I guessed what might happen was in the first six months of learning it. No surprises since. Codebases from years ago are still rock-solid.

Why can't we do this at the frontend, goddammit?

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#294

Post by snickerdoodle12 »

_kblcuk_ wrote: post #274
a2tech wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working with a client just last month that hired an African engineering group to build a tool for them. What they got delivered was a Next.js train wreck that was so coupled to Vercel's hosting that I couldn't make it run successfully anywhere else. The customer was a non-profit and didn't want to/couldn't afford Vercel's hosting so asked if I could try and make it run and I (naively) thought 'its just javascript, it…

[flagged]

Yup, we do. Mind you, I'm not an american. But we often say something like "the americans" or other less flattering terms.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#295

Post by zwnow »

sfn42 wrote: post #209
zwnow wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone complains that react is so slow and horrible, it isn't. It's their code that's slow and horrible, react is snappy as hell when you use it properly. Why use something that you have to use "properly" when there are things out there that enforce being used properly?

Because I'm not convinced there exists a programming language/library/framework that you can't use improperly. And just to be clear I'm not saying react is better than Vue. I don't know Vue. Maybe it is better. All I'm saying is react is alright in my experience, the problem is people overcomplicate and mess things up. I've seen that in pretty much every piece of software I've ever worked on, backend/frontend/whateve…

I can understand that. For me personally, Vue has a limited set of lifecycle hooks you can use so its hard to pick the wrong one. React on the other hand gives u some kind of use_ for everything, so its first and foremost harder to understand the app lifecycle and to pick the correct hook.

With Vue I started to use Pinia for my whole apps state management, which are data stores. Clean and centralized logic, with React idk what a substitute would be.

I know React can be clean too, but that (in my opinion) requires a lot more depth of knowledge about the framework.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#296

Post by RaptorJ »

amonith wrote: post #218
colejohnson66 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's "missing" is the ability to launch things the "Bash" way: `KEY=value ./myApp`. Where the variable is scoped to the single execution. Windows' command prompt requires two separate invocations: set KEY=value ./myApp PowerShell also: $env:KEY='value' ./myApp Or more "verbosely/explicitly": [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('KEY', 'value') ./myApp Regardless, all those methods aren't "scoped".

eh `cmd /C "set KEY=value && ./myApp"` isn't that bad if you really need complete isolation.

or directly in powershell, `Start-Process myproc.exe -Environment @{ FOO = 'bar' }`

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#297

Post by skeptrune »

I felt seen after reading this post. NextJS was really good somewhere around v11 when it was first becoming stable and create-react-app was unusable. It's been rapidly enshittified since then.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#298

Post by detectivestory »

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #253

> In general Next.js has so many layers of abstraction that 99.9999% of projects don't need. This true to most software projects that are used more than one set of people. Joe Armstrong proposed a solution that we should opensource functions only and people could assemble everything else using these opensource functions. I start to think that he might be right and instead using "frameworks" we should use these set of…

I did find it quite funny that he makes this claim, but then writes an entire blog piece about how nextjs is no good because of one particular thing it doesn't do to his liking!

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#299

Post by benmccann »

tommica wrote: post #240
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I actually love sveltekit considering that its really easy to self host it / host it anywhere serverless. I hosted it on cloudflare. Though I do feel that everyone is pushing nextjs in the llm space and llm's are more comfortable with next instead of sveltekit but they can still do some mind boggling things in sveltekit and I love them while using sveltekit itself

Svelte is financed by vercel, so who knows if sveltekit drifts in the same direction.

Only 3/40 Svelte maintainers work at Vercel and they mainly finance work on Svelte core. SvelteKit day-to-day is primarily maintained by folks outside Vercel

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#300

Post by Etheryte »

pjmlp wrote: post #270
Etheryte wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most languages and frameworks logging is as simple as import, initialize, done. Here it's far from it.

Really, which ones? Because anything Java, .NET and Python, it certainly requires configuration and related infrastructure.

Log4j can be as simple as add the dependency and you're good to go. Of course, you can do fancier setups and bridge your logs wherever where it is more work, but out of the box, it's very straightforward and batteries included. I have a very hard time believing you're seriously arguing the case that some of the most commonly used languages don't have good options for logging.
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