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Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

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Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#101

Post by segphault »

dntrkv wrote: post #71
metalliqaz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire your exceptional work cataloguing these resources. However, just one look at that giant horde of links is, to me, a perfect demonstration of why the front-end development ecosystem is way out of control. Its amazing to me that the autoconf/automake/libtool system for making write-once-run-everywhere *nix applications is downright simple by today's standards. Every year the hot libraries change, the build too…

Browsers and JavaScript are what we have, we can't magically replace every browser and JS implementation in the world. We have to figure out where we want to go and slowly get there. That is exactly what is happening in the frontend world and that is why there is so much churn. Browser apps have to work across 4 major browsers with versions going back almost 10 years, an infinite amount of screen sizes, and a near in…

> And the other great thing about these tools is you can add/remove them as needed.

In order to get that freedom, you need to build the tooling in such a way that it aligns with the web standards, so that when the standards catch up you can drop what you don't actually need anymore. We all switched from coffescript to ES6 and Babel because ES6, being standards-based, will eventually be supported in browsers, right?

And yet, with JSX we have a gratuitously non-standard dialect of JavaScript that isn't on the standards track and will never be natively supported in browsers. So, even when browsers catch up and offer full support for modern ES6 syntax, we're still stuck with transpilers because Facebook thought it was a good idea to tightly couple their custom templating language to JavaScript itself instead of wrapping it in template literals, which is the standards-based approach that ES6 actually provides for embedded DSLs and templating.

Today, in Europe and North America, roughly ~85% of users run a browser version that has native ES6 support. IE marketshare fell off a cliff in 2016, and now IE11 is at less than five percent and still falling. I don't actually need to transpile during development today, and I won't need to do it in production either in a year or two, and yet everything written with JSX will need a transpiler forever.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#102

Post by alcasa »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #89

Great. I was waiting for React to stabilize before I learned it. I've been cleverly waiting since 2006 to learn jquery. Will start next year.

> Great. I was waiting for React to stabilize before I learned it.

But once it's stable, it's outdated.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#103

Post by mentat »

camus2 wrote: post #55
acemarke wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seems to be a bit of a non-sequitur. Application development is complex, period. Posix development is complicated. Qt is big and complicated. Makefiles are complicated. Autotools is complicated. Big Java server apps are complicated. C++ is complicated. We've just hit the point where people are trying to do the same thing in a browser. Would you prefer to build your application using Make, Scons, Waf, CMa…

> Application development is complex, period. Posix development is complicated. Qt is big and complicated. Makefiles are complicated. Autotools is complicated. Big Java server apps are complicated. C++ is complicated. We've just hit the point where people are trying to do the same thing in a browser. Actually, Java, C++,QT and co are going through great length to make development simpler and all the compilation pipel…

The word Java and "simple development" is just absurd for any real application much less most enterprise applications.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#105

Post by ng12 »

paganel wrote: post #49
colordrops wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about others but I tire of these comments chiding the "out of control" front-end ecosystem. The situation has already changed years ago. We aren't going to get off of your lawn while you continue to beat a dead horse. The web is built on open standards and there are billions of pages and apps out there. To expect web development to be a perfect monoculture is a failure of your imagination and ability to…

Not the OP, but I expect the web to be a thing where documents (i.e. mainly text) don't have any issues rendering on my 5-year old phone or on my 8-year laptop (both of which work very well, still, and which I don't plan to replace anytime soon). The recent web practices (I'm talking mostly of the last 2-3 years, since more and more people have started copying Twitter with its launch of its "every website needs to be…

Well what's unique about HN and Wikipedia? They're largely non-monezited. If Buzzfeed can make more money off of a flashy website it's hard to argue with.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#106

Post by tannhaeuser »

jpk wrote: post #97
goldbeck wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is such a good and valuable idea, why will it never happen? Seems the major internet-interface makers (Google via Chrome, FB via their app, for ex), are vying for control over the way people develop web applications too. Making an alternative that gets adopted would be invaluable to them.

It won't happen because none of them will implement the other guy's new thing. Chrome would do the Google thing, Edge would do the Microsoft thing, and Firefox would sit back and balk that none of that junk is standardized. Then webdevs would just stick with Javascript and friends because it's the only thing that mostly works everywhere. That's exactly what happened to Dart, right? It had aspirations of hopping into…

You could also see it the other way around. That we've come pretty far with standardization based on JavaScript and HTML5 (and CSS and SQL and POSIX and IP ...). What do you expect exactly?

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#107

Post by ng12 »

segphault wrote: post #101
dntrkv wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers and JavaScript are what we have, we can't magically replace every browser and JS implementation in the world. We have to figure out where we want to go and slowly get there. That is exactly what is happening in the frontend world and that is why there is so much churn. Browser apps have to work across 4 major browsers with versions going back almost 10 years, an infinite amount of screen sizes, and a near in…

> And the other great thing about these tools is you can add/remove them as needed. In order to get that freedom, you need to build the tooling in such a way that it aligns with the web standards, so that when the standards catch up you can drop what you don't actually need anymore. We all switched from coffescript to ES6 and Babel because ES6, being standards-based, will eventually be supported in browsers, right? A…

> which is the standards-based approach that ES6 actually provides for embedded DSLs and templating.

Template literals could not possibly be a replacement for JSX. JSX is Javascript, template literals are strings. JSX isn't a templating language by design, it's one of the primary advantages.

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#108

Post by leeoniya »

colordrops wrote: post #99
copperx wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been struggling to understand how WebAssembly will change things on the web. Will you be able to compile an arbitrary C/C++ binary to run on a browser? Will syscalls be emulated? What about the filesystem? It looks like to get such a thing working we would need an OS running on top of JS. But maybe I'm missing something.

There is clearly some sort of mapping available to a JavaScript FFI for doing I/O, as both the Unreal engine and Unity have been ported to WebAssembly. If you can run a video game engine in the browser you can run anything. I believe there are proposals in place as well to add opcodes to directly interface with browser capabilities rather than going through a JS FFI.

> If you can run a video game engine in the browser you can run anything

no

Re: Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework

#110

Post by erikpukinskis »

paganel wrote: post #49
colordrops wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about others but I tire of these comments chiding the "out of control" front-end ecosystem. The situation has already changed years ago. We aren't going to get off of your lawn while you continue to beat a dead horse. The web is built on open standards and there are billions of pages and apps out there. To expect web development to be a perfect monoculture is a failure of your imagination and ability to…

Not the OP, but I expect the web to be a thing where documents (i.e. mainly text) don't have any issues rendering on my 5-year old phone or on my 8-year laptop (both of which work very well, still, and which I don't plan to replace anytime soon). The recent web practices (I'm talking mostly of the last 2-3 years, since more and more people have started copying Twitter with its launch of its "every website needs to be…

I'm with you, but it's just part of the growing pains. The web is successful because it's easy to layer businesses on top of each other... I can have a Tumblr with a Shopify backend and Google Adwords on top. Apps are walled gardens so they can only enforce one business model at a time. That can make things nice and tidy, but it walls you out of the messy, compositional business models of the web.

Because business models are composed on the web, it's just harder to settle on unified design standards. It takes time for everyone to agree on a separation of responsibilities on the page. This is compounded by the sheer newness of the business models. My webcomic about fancy cheeses has a segment marketing a line of tractors now to industrial buyers at a conference in Wisconsin this week? OK. That's an opportunity I probably wouldn't have had selling Java apps.

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