371–380 of 866 posts
In the age of AI, it's all about popularity contest unfortunately. More people use it, more data points, more training data to feed, better AI response, more people use it. Svelte shot itself in the foot with runes and other incompatible (but minor) syntax changes. Bad timing. Because now whenever I ask any AI, they will suggest old syntax that doesn't compile.
React didn't "win" because it’s the best, it won because it became the safe default. Everyone knows it, hiring is easy, and the ecosystem is huge. That’s great for stability but not so great for innovation—lots of teams never even look at lighter options like Svelte or Solid. React still works fine, but we probably lean on it more out of inertia than actual fit.
Web components are the way out of this trap. Every single framework that isn't React should be wholeheartedly supporting web components to make sure that they have access to a viable ecosystem of components and utilities without having to bootstrap an entire competitor to React and it's ecosystem. While a lot of people view web components as competitors to frameworks, they don't really have to be. The just define an…
Not unless you can develop an equivalent to React Native. That's the rub here: browser tech is just way slower than what can be achieved with native code. React's primary value (now) is deduping GUI development across platforms.
Sticking with React because of "stability" / "ecosystem" seems very strange to me - I've never seen more churn than in codebases making heavy use of the React ecosystem. Constant breakage. Constant rewrites as functions, features, and sometimes entire packages are deprecated. I also tend to see a lot of the "left-pad" phenomenon in such codebases. Large swathes of the "React ecosystem" are libraries whose relevant fu…
React isn't winning by default. It's been so effective, so well designed that it's lived long enough to become the defacto standard... and the villian. Claiming React is slowing innovation is an absolutely bonkers take when React is essentially the only sane stable choice in a sea of "me too" frameworks and libraries with conflicting and confusing design choices.
React was innovative when it just appeared 12 years ago. But a few years after there were already many other frameworks doing similar things. And since then it has been good enough, but not the leading innovative frontend framework anymore. React has rather matured in dealing with it's own outdated Virtual DOM design, making it much more boiler platy than modern alternatives.
I'm familiar enough with Angular, React, Flutter, Vue, and Svelte as big names in the ecosystem, but have really only done scrappy development with React and not much with the others.
Google trends seems to show React is still a leader [1], and React has more than double the amount of Github stars than any of the others I've mentioned except Flutter, by which it still leads a healthy margin.
- [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=32&date=today%2...
React isn't winning by default. It's been so effective, so well designed that it's lived long enough to become the defacto standard... and the villian. Claiming React is slowing innovation is an absolutely bonkers take when React is essentially the only sane stable choice in a sea of "me too" frameworks and libraries with conflicting and confusing design choices.
Other frameworks, like Vue and Alpine, let you use them "progressively" and you can even do so with a CDN to avoid having to set up npm/vite from the get go. Their intro docs have instructions for how to do so, along with the relevant caveats
React claims to be progressive, but since it's JSX it requires a compile step. Its intro docs do not have instructions for using it via CDN. You can make it work if you really want to, but it basically requires shipping the compiler to the client along with the JSX and doing the compilation client-side, which obviously scales so poorly that their docs don't cover it.
To recap, my whole point is that React scales very poorly down to simple sites. And since most site are not Facebook or the Spotify web player or Netflix (and even Netflix is moving away from React: https://x.com/NetflixUIE/status/923374215041912833), I think it's very hard to argue that React is effective or well designed.