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React is winning by default and slowing innovation

lorenstew.art

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Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#541

Post by isqueiros »

noodletheworld wrote: post #390
_heimdall wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been a part of quite a few tech stack decisions at various companies and startups. I have literally never heard an argument made for react that included merits of the framework itself. The decision was always based on a combination for familiarity, ability to hire for eng roles, and the ecosystem.

Then why dont you pick jquery? Its easy and well known, even now. The answer I see is that react is technically good enough. Using boring technology doesnt mean using the technically most advanced thing. It means picking something safe and stable.

maintaining a large jquery/native js codebase vs a react one is not even in the same ballpark.

even when not being opinionated react foundationally has more structure for complex code.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#542

Post by WickyNilliams »

sensanaty wrote: post #538
WickyNilliams wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I get it. I don't think the "Just JavaScript" label can be applied to react anymore. It held in a class-based world. But it's not true post hooks. I always hated templating languages > Greenspun's {{rules.length | ordinal}} rule: > Any sufficiently complicated templating language contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of the host language But after working with Vue for…

> Any sufficiently complicated templating language contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of the host language Agreed, and Vue does it right exactly because they don't let you do complex things in the template. You can use ternaries in a pinch, but `computed`s exist so there isn't even a reason to do stuff like that. There's like... 10? directives that you can use and they a…

Yeah I was surprised, how little I felt hampered by its templating language. With things like handlebars and Jinja you often hit a wall like "how the hell do I express this in this language?", but never experienced it with vue.

Aside: I wish other frameworks would steal Vue's event modifiers. Doing things like `@click.prevent` or `@keyup.prevent.down` is so nice

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#543

Post by sensanaty »

gloosx wrote: post #540
sensanaty wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5 straightforward hooks `useEffect` is straightforward? Cloudflare recently (like, literally 4 days ago)[1] had a pretty big outage because of the improper use of `useEffect` (surprise, surprise, it was the dependency array), a hook so infamous if you search "When should I use `useEffect`" you'll get approximately 9 trillion hits, with nearly all of them telling you something different, including Dan Abramov himsel…

Well, that is really embarrassing for Cloudflare... A recursion in a side-effect via dependencies is a rookie mistake, it's hard to imagine it could slip into production with a proper due process. Maybe they should stop vibe-coding and deploying things to production without any tests or review?

If after nearly a decade swarms of people are still making the exact same mistakes with how they use a specific method exposed by the library, then the problem isn't with the hundreds/thousands of people making the mistake, the design of the method is broken. This type of issue simply does not exist in Vue or Svelte even if people abuse watchers (which I've anecdotally noticed tends to happen from React devs writing Vue code).

Also I just want to point out again that Dan Abramov had to write an insanely long guide to using useEffect [1]. This piece is around 10k words explaining in-depth how useEffect works. That is insane for one of the fundamental, core methods exposed by a library.

[1] https://overreacted.io/a-complete-guide-to-useeffect/

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#545

Post by rossant »

ikrenji wrote: post #114
rossant wrote: post #111

In simple applications, can we replace JS frameworks by a document with guidelines and best practices? What if I want to avoid frameworks and stick to vanilla JS, following instead good strategy and coding conventions for managing state, reacting to events, etc, all in pure JavaScript while avoiding spaghetti code. Does a document like this exist?

so you want to avoid using a framework in order to basically code something in pure JS that does what the framework does? whats the point of that?

The point is to avoid dependency hell and take full responsibility for the entire codebase instead of delegating it to third parties.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#546

Post by thedelanyo »

gloosx wrote: post #472

React isn’t just "winning by default" It's winning because at the core it's just JavaScript function composition. A component is a function, conditionals are `if (...) { ... } else { ... }`, loops are `map()`. JSX is just sugar for function calls. In Svelte you are writing XML with little JavaScript islands inside it. Instead of if you get `{#if}{:else}{/if}`. Thats not "ergonomic" – thats a mini-language stapled on…

Sure this is js

// React code here

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#547

Post by Banou »

tcfhgj wrote: post #485
Banou wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React in itself isn't that heavy , and things like preact exists if you want an even lighter library, it's mostly other dependencies that are heavy, so the blame is mostly on the side of the devs, not react, for having heavy and clunky software.

https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht... Select all angular, leptos, vue, solid and react variants -> react literally is consistently the slowest

Good thing that 99% websites don't need to modify 1k dom elements every seconds then, if you do using a DOM library isn't the right choice. My comment was about size library, in response to the parent comment about MBs of js. I'd gladly take a 10ms slower update on 1k rows(that practically never happens, ever heard of virtual lists?) for a maintainable codebase any day.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#548

Post by hasanhaja »

gloosx wrote: post #519
WickyNilliams wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hooks are very much not normal functions though. They are a new "colour" of function much like async functions - they can only be called in components or other hooks, they cannot be called conditionally, cannot be called in loops etc. The so-called "rules of hooks" (To get ahead of the common objection: of course it's still JavaScript by virtue of being implemented in JavaScript. But so are Svelte, Vue et all)

Surely they are not normal JavaScript functions, but at least the syntax itself is not turned into a DSL like we see it in Svelte or Vue. That is the main difference.

Syntactical preferences are subjective though and are prone to familiarity bias. I started my webdev career with React so I'm really familiar with JSX and like it, but that alone isn't enough to make engineering decisions.

I think semantics could be a more objective way to assess the DX of frameworks because you can have/add a syntactic layer on top that suits your preferences [1]. Semantics would be things like rules of hooks, footguns of `useEffect`, component level reactivity rather than fine-grained reactivity, etc. The high level outcome of this would be being able to answer the following question:

"How likely is it that this framework will put me in the pit of success with minimal overhead?"

[1] https://vuejs.org/guide/extras/render-function.html#jsx-tsx

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#549

Post by simianwords »

gloosx wrote: post #472

React isn’t just "winning by default" It's winning because at the core it's just JavaScript function composition. A component is a function, conditionals are `if (...) { ... } else { ... }`, loops are `map()`. JSX is just sugar for function calls. In Svelte you are writing XML with little JavaScript islands inside it. Instead of if you get `{#if}{:else}{/if}`. Thats not "ergonomic" – thats a mini-language stapled on…

Clear difference between a library approach and a framework approach. react looks like a library but svelte and tbh angular also look like a framework. As devs we are more comfortable with libraries unless framework offers enough value.
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