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Does anybody like React?

jsx.lol

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Re: Does anybody like React?

#81

Post by pibaker »

Of course people do. No one is forced to use React or any other web framework unlike how they are practically forced to use JavaScript, and yet React wins. This should be enough evidence that people like it enough, at least more than most other frameworks out there.

It is also somewhat ironic that until late 2010s a common complaint about web development is how fast it changes and how many new things are coming up all the times. It was a very valid complaint, of course. But then when the React monoculture rose to the top, and everyone decides to complain about how that sucks instead. You really can't win.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#82

Post by saila »

colordrops wrote: post #41

No, I prefer much lighter frameworks that are closer to web standards, such as LitElement, which is a relatively light wrapper around Web Component standards. yes, they are slightly clunky, but they work great without a build step. I just edit the code and reload the page, no need to worry about a 5MB bundle. Unless you are writing code that is deployed to a million users running on Nokia brick phone browsers, it wor…

I have an Astro site that's mostly static with a couple interactive components. I recently converted the components from React to Lit and the result is so much simpler.

One of the things that was clunky in the React version was the use of setInterval. I had to write a hook in React and it just added this unnecessary layer of weirdness in how it all interacts[1]. In the Lit version, I just use setInterval normally and there's nothing extra to understand.

[1] https://overreacted.io/making-setinterval-declarative-with-r...

Re: Does anybody like React?

#83

Post by queenkjuul »

fishtoaster wrote: post #15

As someone who lived through all major waves of JS for the last ~16 years, I do love react, in a sense: React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried. I'd take React over the Angular 1 days any time. I'd take Angular 1's full-bodied MVC over the "build it yourself from scratch every time" approach of Backbone. I'd take Backbone's minimal MVC structure over the classic JQuery Soup architecture.…

I never wanna use anything but Svelte ever again, honestly.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#84

Post by c-smile »

What if:

1. JS supports JSX literals so

   let elDef = Text;
will be compiled into

   let elDef = ["div", {id:"some"}, ["Text"]];
2. We extend DOM API to accept such constructs:

   element.append(elDef);  // same thing as element.append("Text");
   element.prepend(elDef); // ditto
   element.patch(elDef);   // patch element's DOM by elDef
3. Add appropriate events: componentDidMount, componentWillUnmount, etc. for cases when tag in JSX (uppercased) resolves to a class or function.

4. Add render() support. A method that generates tree of elDef's. It gets called by append(),prepend() and patch().

And we will get native React implementation. This will be quite useful and allowed to marry React alike approach with WebComponents into single mechanism.

1...4 is how it is implemented in my Sciter as the Reactor thing, see: https://docs.sciter.com/docs/Reactor/

Re: Does anybody like React?

#85

Post by onemoresoop »

lambdaone wrote: post #73
fishtoaster wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like your argument is with SPAs, not React in particular?

SPAs are a monster that grew and grew; an idea that at first seemed like a clever optimization has generated huge and complex systems that are a nightmare to work with, and are bloated, slow and insecure. Web components are the next big idea. I hope they have a chance to work.

I hate spas everywhere too but if you needed to build one for valid reasons React is probably a good bet due to large ecosystem and adoption. I personally avoided React as much as I could and luckily I won’t have to have to work with it.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#86

Post by VerifiedReports »

simonw wrote: post #72

It's interesting how all of the LLM tools seemed to default to React in 2024-2025, but this year I'm finding them much more likely to default to vanilla JS and HTML instead. (Purely based on vibes, I do not have anything robust to back this up.)

It seems that LLM tools should make these frameworks unnecessary.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#88

Post by charcircuit »

Zanfa wrote: post #78
imperio59 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been a non issue when using proper routing libraries that push history entries on the stack properly and render routes from the top of the component tree down. You hate BAD react SPAs that break the fundamentals of how the web works. Good ones take care to not do that. React fundamentally doesn't cause this issue either. You can use a different framework than react or even vanilla JS and still produce the sa…

> You hate BAD react SPAs that break the fundamentals of how the web works. But that’s all of them? If Github, Reddit, LinkedIn and Facebook and others are unable to build SPAs that don’t constantly break the fundamentals while also choking the browser, maybe it is a tech problem.

If the APIs are too hard to use properly that no site can use it right, then it's a browser issue.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#89

Post by neko_ranger »

React really shines once you embrace graphql and have components pass graphql fragments upward so that components can easily query for the data it needs, and the backend only gets one query per view. React is really annoying if you're doing REST.

It didn't click until I saw a react+graphql project, and it makes sense why meta created react and graphql

Re: Does anybody like React?

#90

Post by jdw64 »

vjeux wrote: post #57

I'm biased because I was part of the people that made it happen but yeah, I love React. Before that, I would try everything under the sun to fix the issues I was having doing front-end. But since React came out, I don't have this need anymore. I can just focus on building stuff.

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