Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling • Hacker News Board

Re: Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

#181

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

athammer wrote: post #178

brundolf wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too imprecise: - People might interpret that as "drop-in replacement for webpack", which is definitely not true - Even as just "a replacement for webpack"; Webpack and Vite have a lot of overlap, and it makes sense to compare them, but I think there are too many asterisks and nuances to say they're equivalent, in official materials, unqualified

Rather imprecise then have people confused of what it does - especially when the confusion could be fixed by a sentence. Just have a hyper link that directions to a comparison page explaining the nuance. Even without the hyperlink I wouldn’t assume people would think it’s a 1:1 clone drop in replacement. People don’t just drop in a new tool without research and comparing it against their new tool.

[deleted]

Re: Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

#182

Post by gexla » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

krick wrote: post #46

It gave me a pause to think about how it came that I can never really tell what am I looking at anymore. Forget the HN title, which is stupid — what does this landing page tell me? Well, that it's… next gen, and it apparently can catch up with me, which is not much, since I'm not really catching up with what's going on anyway. Also, that it's "tooling". Like IDE, or framework, or maybe a chainsaw. Can't tell. "Gettin…

Personally, I feel like it's rare that I stumble on a tool and need to read its landing page. If I know of it, it's probably because someone told me about it or it's already part of something I inherited. And that's probably the only way I would consider it anyway. I don't care what their pitch is if I don't know anyone using it. Much more common is stumbling across a repo with tooling I'm specifically looking for (because I don't know anyone doing that specific thing and I'm not looking for an alternative to something I'm already using) and the repo docs are even worse.

Re: Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

#183

Post by thr0wawayf00 » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #84

mgomez wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Why Vite?" button on the homepage is fairly "front and center" to me and is only a single click away: https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why

It's still not concise enough. It's a long article you have to read to figure out what you are reading about. "WTF IS IT?" is an endemic problem with marketing and startups. Marketing is a skill, that many people in marketing so often don't have, and lot of leaders fail to grasp. It's so sad. Imagine losing 1/2 of your potential uptake because of poor choice of words.

I think is more of an indictment on the javascript ecosystem generally, because there's so much more to building an app that runs JS than just your standard MVC/MVVM/pick-your-pattern web frameworks.

You have to deal with various layers of transpilation on your JS, styles and assets and that all needs to be flexible enough to fit a wide set of use cases for the community. It's gotten to the point you need to be an expert in all of the different ways you can bundle and deploy a JS app in order for the jargon associated with these tools to make any sense.

Re: Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

#184

Post by canaus » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

So is it safe to say that this tool is mostly trying to solve the developer experience side of front-end development, instead of trying to create a "new" technology such as SSR?

I've just mostly seen "fast" and "HMR" as the features of Vite, but I can't see a team switching over an entire project just to solve something that was probably decently "solved" to begin with.

Re: Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

#185

Post by gedy » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

monkey_monkey wrote: post #124

hardwaregeek wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may notice that all of the negative comments are around superficial nitpicking of the website copy or general bemoaning of the state of front end development. The first is sort of useful in a minor way; the second is pretty useless and generally tired. Vite is a great tool that I’d recommend for anyone who wants to speed up their front end build setup.

> the second is pretty useless and generally tired. Is it really useless though? I wish the front end community tried to make existing things better instead of reinventing the wheel every year and causing immense fragmentation, especially for something like the build toolchain.

Why can't the "back end community" agree on a single server side language and database and compiler? Gee so much churn!

Re: Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

#186

Post by gedy » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

config_yml wrote: post #21

jbrooksuk wrote: post #14

We (Laravel) have just switched the frontend tooling from Laravel Mix (a webpack wrapper) for Vite. https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/vite#main-content The speed gains are super impressive from Vite.

I think Rails should have done the same, vite_ruby is amazing. Thankfully it's easy enough to replace the current options, which feel a bit half-hearted.

It feels like DHH really doesn't want this tooling at all in Rails, but did so reluctantly because so much view tech and mindshare had moved to the client.

Re: Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

#187

Post by prophesi » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

djitz wrote: post #75

krick wrote: post #46

It gave me a pause to think about how it came that I can never really tell what am I looking at anymore. Forget the HN title, which is stupid — what does this landing page tell me? Well, that it's… next gen, and it apparently can catch up with me, which is not much, since I'm not really catching up with what's going on anyway. Also, that it's "tooling". Like IDE, or framework, or maybe a chainsaw. Can't tell. "Gettin…

Quoted post unavailable.

I find it extra funny that most of the comments recommend that they just say it's a webpack replacement. If you don't know what webpack is and visit webpack's site, you'll just see it's an asset bundler which Vite explicitly is not.

And if you do already know what webpack is, then "frontend tooling" and its list of features should make it very obvious what Vite is.

Re: Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

#188

Post by bobthepanda » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

cto_official wrote: post #152

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrible landing page for an otherwise excellent tool. It sets up JS transpiling and bundling for you in an easy way, then provide a server with pretty fast hot reload. This solves 2 problems: - the complicated js project stack is now simple to setup, unlike with webpack - saving and seeing the result of your coding is now almost instant, unlike with CRA It's a joy to use, given that it's from VueJS author, and I hig…

One question .. Is the main goal to make development process easy or does it also have an impact on production performance as well ?

Ideally, for production you're not constantly rebuilding a JS bundle but instead just building once with all the required package versions and then just serving that bundle all the time.

The bundle only really needs to change if the underlying code does, but in pretty much all cases your customers/users are not actually triggering any changes in your underlying code, that's a security risk.

Re: Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

#189

Post by cmykk4 » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

barkingcat wrote: post #171

dzogchen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not a nightmare. It is actually quite pleasant thanks to Vite.

You say that now, but 3 years in the future you'll be posting "Vite destroyed the Javascript ecosystem"

With respect, this suggests to me that you haven't actually read about how Vite works. It's not aiming to be just another contender, it sort of positions itself as a "best of both worlds" abstraction layer on other tools, whereby esbuild is used for faster compilation and rollup is used for configurable builds. It's not as drastic of a change as you're making it out to be, unless someone is coming from like a Gulp-based setup or something.

My work uses Webpack 3 and 4 (in a monorepo) and I was able to get Vite up and running on a test branch (as a sandbox) within a day, even though it's using roll-up instead of Webpack and even though our code was pretty old. It compiled in like a few seconds, it was wild.

Re: Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

#190

Post by finfinfin » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

matt89 wrote: post #143

finfinfin wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Front-end tooling that I have to run on the server? Even people familiar with the JS ecosystem might be confused by that.

I believe you are overexaggerating. It has always been true that you needed some kind of local server when doing frontend development. There are multiple browser mechanism that would not work in any way other than when rendering html/css/js that was returned from a server. Consequently a build tool (or dev-tool) that offers you a dev-server is really nothing weird in frontend development world. Same as 10-15 years ag…

Just google “front-end tools” and look at the few top results. There are many tools for front-end development that are not build tools or have to run on the server.