React is winning by default and slowing innovation

The main gist of this seems to be that other frameworks beat React on performance.. but who cares? The speed difference in 99.99% of apps is one that no-one can perceive

React trades this very minor performance hit to give us better developer clarity through a functional paradigm. This makes complex state management much easier to manage

A better article could've been written for this title. I just don't care about improving renders by 3ms when it's already fast enough

I think the reason React won, and is still top dog, is that improvements to performance at this point aren't worth it if you have to give up something beneficial

I feel this with every fiber of my being. I used to do a TON of front-end work, some of it quite cutting edge, delivering highly performant user experiences in the browser that had previously been only thought possible in a native app. Back in like 2009-2015. I was deeply connected with the web standards fundamentals and how to leverage them mostly directly.

I detoured into heavier focus on backend work for quite a while, concurrent with the rise of React, and watched its rise with suspicion because it seemed like such an inefficient way to do things. That, and JSX's limitations around everything having to be an expression made me want to gauge out my eyes.

Still, React pushed and laid the foundation for some really important paradigm shifts in terms of state management. The path from the old mental models around state to a unidirectional flow of immutable data... re-learning a totally new mental model was painful, but important.

Even though it's been chaotic at times, React has delivered a lot of value in terms of innovation and how we conceptualize web application architecture.

But today, when you compare it to something like SolidJS, it's really clear to see how Solid delivers basically all the same benefits, but in an architecture that's both simpler and more performant. And in a way that's much easier to organize and reason about than React. You still get JSX, server components, reactive state management (actually a MUCH better and cleaner foundation for that) and any React dev could move to Solid with fairly little mental re-wiring of the neural pathways. It doesn't require you to really change anything about how you think about application architecture and structure. It just basically does everything React does but better, faster, and with drastically smaller bundle sizes.

Yet I still have to begrudgingly use React in several contexts because of the industry-wide inertia, and I really wish I didn't have to.

Yeah, well we're often forced to just use something. Computers and cars are a good example of baseline things we're forced to use for some category of tasks.

It only achieves purity by re-defining the pre-existing concept of "pure". Component state is not passed as an argument, and can affect the output of a render function. It's only by playing semantic games that react claims to be pure, which I find to be of dubious value in this domain anyway.

You don’t have to! I wonder what you think of this framework my company (mostly me) developed over the last decade, I am open sourcing it under MIT license: https://github.com/Qbix/Q.js