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Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework
11–20 of 181 posts
Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework
#12Sounds like you're in a similar place as me a year ago. Here's a list of tools that I'd use:
- TypeScript for language. Gives you an insanely expressive type system that is a step up from Python duck typing (which you seem familiar with after perusing your GH).
- React for framework. Frontend experts will shit on it for being non-performant or having a poor UX, but the community is massive and you'll have a ton of support both in terms of people that can help you when you're stuck and libraries that do a lot of work for you.
- Jest for code testing and Cypress for integration testing. The obvious tools for the job.
- Chakra UI for a UI framework. Has all the bells and whistles, DX is great, and there are plenty of escape hatches for non-default behavior.
- TipTap for text editor. This is the _most_ at risk of not being supported in 10 years, but I still see it as a low risk because they have a solid monetization strategy in place.
- Electron for the desktop app. If you _really_ don't want to use Electron then use Tauri (what we use at my company). It uses the native browser engine so package sizes are ridiculously small and it's insanely performant.
- Don't worry about the mobile apps for now. At the very most, just make it a web app that has responsive theming for mobile.
Good luck and have fun!
Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework
#13Typescript doesn’t make sense if you don’t manipulate a lot of data or around the app. It can be a pain and lead to a lot of fatigue if don’t get benefits out of it. I am still using js for most of my personal front end projects, and still benefits from intellisense from libraries written in typescript even in standard .js file with VSCode and other IDEs. But 100% of my project uses Eslint (with « recommended » rules + eslint-config-prettier), this is absolutely a must have.
Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework
#14Use whatever you like. Is a spare time project, you don't want the tool be an excuse to not start right now. The end user doesn't give a shit about minimal performance wins.
Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework
#15I find Vue easier to learn than React and its documentation is great.
Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework
#16Quasar lets you deploy spa, SSR, electron, android and iOS, reusing what's appropriate. It uses Vue.
But my real advice is go kick the tyres. Try hello world in half a dozen candidates.
Take a thin vertical slice through your app, and try implementing in your short list of frameworks.
It will be worth the investment
Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework
#17OP, I didn’t grok the description of what you’re trying to build enough to have a useful suggestion for you, but as a word of caution you’re probably going to get a lot of responses that don’t take into account you’re specific situation but instead are based on the commenter’s current favorite front end tool. As someone who is pretty new to front end development, you would do well to stick with standard tooling like React. For all its flaws it has a robust community around it that will make it easier for you to get help when you get stuck, and libraries that will do some of the work for you.
Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework
#18React with MUI is probably the "safe" choice right now. Getting good performance out of React when you have a lot of things updating in real time can be tricky but it sounds like you probably wouldn't run into that right away in an app like this.
We picked react with mui and indeed have many performance issues; we redid a part with tailwind and vanilla js en the difference in perf is quite bizar. But indeed more (a lot more) work.
Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework
#19React with MUI is probably the "safe" choice right now. Getting good performance out of React when you have a lot of things updating in real time can be tricky but it sounds like you probably wouldn't run into that right away in an app like this.
We picked react with mui and indeed have many performance issues; we redid a part with tailwind and vanilla js en the difference in perf is quite bizar. But indeed more (a lot more) work.
Yeah if you want good performance out of a non-trivial React app you need to carefully consider memoization. It can become quite tedious making sure you've memoized the right things at the right places.
MUI also can be slow if you put dynamic stuff in the sx component property. Tailwind has the very nice property that there's no dynamic CSS generation at runtime.
Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework
#20Typescript doesn’t make sense if you don’t manipulate a lot of data or around the app. It can be a pain and lead to a lot of fatigue if don’t get benefits out of it. I am still using js for most of my personal front end projects, and still benefits from intellisense from libraries written in typescript even in standard .js file with VSCode and other IDEs. But 100% of my project uses Eslint (with « recommended » rules…
I very strongly disagree with this. Typescript is a lifesaver on a non-trivial React codebase. Writing correct code is hard and you need every advantage you can muster. Type checking is an important part of that.