Ask HN: How can we make React better?

I work on React. We have our own ideas on where we'd like to take the project (see https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/03/01/sneak-peek-beyond-react-16.html), but we always like to hear from larger communities too.

Whether you use React now, tried it in the past, or decided not to try it – what could make React better for you?

Anything in particular you think Vue does better? We'd love to improve.

Styles.

I know Facebook has an internal CSS Module thing that is not open source ready. So this has been pushed off to user land. However, lack of an officially blessed style solution makes React components less reusable across projects compared to Vue. Thanks to vue-loader, the Vue community can focus on other things. I am NOT advocating for single file components like Vue, I am hoping that FB can just bless a solution so we can move forward as community.

I agree styles are an afterthought in React. I'm starting to grow fond of Styled Components, but even then I still find doing more advanced CSS operations a bit of a pain. Things like global styles, media-queries, pseudo-selectors and nested selectors sometimes require a pretty good understanding of the library's API and almost always require a trip to the documentation.

I'm really quite pleased Vue sort applied the component approach to styles by slapping them in the component file and then left it at that.

Fair.

The frontend ecosystem is definitely less mature than backend. Gmail and Google Maps, two of the first "real" client-side applications, were launched in 2004 and 2005 – so the entire ecosystem is really about a dozen years old. Before that people didn’t really “realize” that JS and web was a real programming environment. That means there's a lot to catch up on and a lot to experiment with as people figure out the best ways to build things. Compare this to backend or infrastructure development which have had decades to develop.

That said – I completely recognize that this can be painful. You don't always need to use the latest stuff though. If a "less fashionable" technology does the job for you, you can definitely use it. And trying to mitigate some of this complexity is why my team works on projects like Create React App which (whether or not you're using React) can insulate you from some of the "churn" that people often feel in the ecosystem.

In React itself, we try to have as few breaking changes as possible. (And our team needs to keep 50,000 components at Facebook working through our changes, which is a major incentive to not break things unnecessarily.) Our last major release, React 16, was released in Sep 2017. But it actually included almost no breakages (we mostly bumped the version number out of caution because it included a huge number of internal refactors). So I'd say our last "actually breaking" release was React 15, in Apr 2016, about 2.5 years ago. React 17 will probably be released sometime next year, so we're talking 3-ish years between releases. I think it's hard to do much better than that without stopping forward progress. Note that if we don't improve React quickly enough people will abandon it for another (incompatible) library, which doesn't really solve your problem either. So we try our best to make sure we're working on (what we think are) the right things and do our best to get it right the first time.