Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Octane – React’s programming model, compiled

octanejs.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: Octane – React’s programming model, compiled

#31

Post by adzm »

Guillaume86 wrote: post #24

Just took a glance so I may be completely wrong, fell free to ignore, but if I understand correctly, tsrx is just syntactic sugar for normal tsx code and does not enable anything new? If this is the case: I think introducing tsrx as part of Octane muddies the water a bit and makes me more hesitant to try (even if it is optional). The idea to make tsx files more readable may be interesting but in that case it should g…

agreed, tsrx is neat as supported but personally i'm not a fan of it, makes me think of angular and more domain specific language stuff. the whole tsrx angle makes me wary of this project entirely, which is a shame, since octane does sound pretty neat. i'll still check it out, but this was indeed my initial reaction upon seeing tsrx here

Re: Octane – React’s programming model, compiled

#33

Post by adzm »

An interesting feature is this:

> A current-state getter. useState and useReducer return [state, update, getState], so a delayed callback can read the latest value instead of a stale capture.

There are currently a few workarounds in React for this, and using other state management libs also give you non-reactive access to current state, but this is a big help in certain situations.

For example, a callback / event that you pass to all your child elements, that needs to access the current state when run, therefore normally needs to be recreated with the new state captured (in useCallback) whenever state changes, which then causes all child components to re-render. Non-reactive access to current state in callbacks avoids this entirely.

There are some hacks that fix this by wrapping the updated callback in a ref and updating it with an event (for example, https://usehooks-ts.com/react-hook/use-event-callback useEventCallback as implemented various places) and returning a stable reference to a function that calls that saved one, though I always wonder if there are downsides to this.

Re: Octane – React’s programming model, compiled

#35

Post by gbjcantab »

ricardobeat wrote: post #28

Would look more appealing without the AI flavour. If you're vibe coding, do yourself a favor and write website copy yourself - it's the only evidence of human input or oversight your project will have.

It’s especially grating in this case because Dominic Gannaway, the creator of Octane, is the real deal (creator of Inferno, former React core team member, former Svelte core team member); so the project landing page looks like generic 2026 slopcoded abandonware, but it is in fact a real project made by someone who’s one of the great minds of frontend framework development (with heavy Claude use apparently, to be clear).

Re: Octane – React’s programming model, compiled

#36

Post by catlifeonmars »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #30
ricardobeat wrote: post #28

Would look more appealing without the AI flavour. If you're vibe coding, do yourself a favor and write website copy yourself - it's the only evidence of human input or oversight your project will have.

I still think code quality itself reigns supreme. I couldn't give less of a damn about a website.

Code quality at one point in time is useful, but what you want is dependability over time and responsiveness to security fixes; this means looking at the maintainer and their attention to detail.

Sure, the website by itself doesn’t mean anything, but placed into context it could mean the maintainer doesn’t put much effort into clear, unambiguous communication.

Re: Octane – React’s programming model, compiled

#37

Post by lioeters »

gbjcantab wrote: post #35
ricardobeat wrote: post #28

Would look more appealing without the AI flavour. If you're vibe coding, do yourself a favor and write website copy yourself - it's the only evidence of human input or oversight your project will have.

It’s especially grating in this case because Dominic Gannaway, the creator of Octane, is the real deal (creator of Inferno, former React core team member, former Svelte core team member); so the project landing page looks like generic 2026 slopcoded abandonware, but it is in fact a real project made by someone who’s one of the great minds of frontend framework development (with heavy Claude use apparently, to be clea…

Sad to see formerly talented software developers become mediocre and bland, losing their unique flavor and personality. Maybe there's still some insight or idea that's their own creation, but it's obscured by the same text and code generation service, a soul-less corporate voice. It's possible language models will mature to better emulate that ineffable quality of having a "heart" or "taste", but it would still be empty without a person on the other side.
Post reply on HN