Rendered at 07:25:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
ManBeardPc 52 seconds ago [-]
It was an improvement in some regards, but a pita most of the time. Before I had to work on an Angular project React was my least favorite frontend library. Solid.js gave me back my sanity (also Svelte 5). Fast, small, includes what I need and feels like just writing JS/TS. Sadly businesses love to torture their developers, themselves and users too much, so React/Angular it is.
fishtoaster 5 hours ago [-]
As someone who lived through all major waves of JS for the last ~16 years, I do love react, in a sense:
React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried.
I'd take React over the Angular 1 days any time. I'd take Angular 1's full-bodied MVC over the "build it yourself from scratch every time" approach of Backbone. I'd take Backbone's minimal MVC structure over the classic JQuery Soup architecture. And I'd take JQuery's dom manipulations and standard-library improvements over the native apis (of that era) in an instant.
React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.
digitaltrees 5 hours ago [-]
But why over vue? My biggest frustration has been how vue ends up moving in the direction of react. The original component architecture with the html template, JavaScript state and css styles in vue was so nice. Even the data fetching a url in the component was so intuitive.
JavaScript community never beating the allegations lol
rao-v 49 minutes ago [-]
Terrific read thanks for digging it up
hajile 4 hours ago [-]
Vue doesn't solve problems better than React (and solves them worse if you have to learn all their proprietary files and DSLs instead of JSX), so there's not much of a reason to switch.
The real discussion would be between React's vdom and something like Solid's signals.
lwansbrough 3 hours ago [-]
It does, if you care about ergonomics. The reactivity model is simpler and arguably less error prone.
It does have its own templating syntax, which is trivial to learn. No more cumbersome to learn than JSX, which is a templating language designed by the React team. Not sure why you chose to make the distinction between JSX and Vue’s DSL as if JSX wasn’t developed for the sole purpose of facilitating React’s virtual DOM.
hajile 3 hours ago [-]
JSX is <div>abc</div> turns into createElement('div', null, 'abc') and you can use that instead of JSX if you like or you can use something like hyperscript. Everything else like mapping or if statements is pure JS and works just like JS anywhere else in your app.
Vue templates mean learning Vue's custom syntax for if statements, loops, dynamic attribute syntax (with its own gotcha), binding dot modifiers, data binding, and whatever else. It requires learning its entire custom directive system. It uses custom syntax for stuff like events too.
I don't see this as remotely comparable with Vue being much closer to something like my time working with Angular 1 (a time I'd rather not repeat).
lwansbrough 3 hours ago [-]
It’s a distinction without a difference. Both need to be transpiled, what happens under the hood is of little concern to anyone.
Please explain React’s reactive data binding since it’s apparently much simpler than v-model=
;)
incrudible 1 hours ago [-]
It is a massive difference. I do not like magic compilers. The JSX transform is trivial and not even necessary, just create a factory function and React.createElement becomes arguably more readable, just not HTML like.
Semaphor 3 hours ago [-]
Vue supports JSX, though to be fair, it’s not idiomatic and hence never shows up in any docs.
snemvalts 26 minutes ago [-]
JSX is a very thin layer of templating logic inside JS. Meaning you have all the language features available while templating. Some arbitrary JS can result in templating.
Vue's DSL is whatever language the developer implemented. Which is probably not enough, depends how much effort they put into it and how good they are in language design. Given that they cargo cult HTML tags to organize components in a pseudo-familiar but not-valid-HTML way, I don't have much confidence in their language design skills.
I'd take the former any day.
lwansbrough 3 hours ago [-]
I definitely sympathize with the feelings about the Composition API. Though I’ve moved past it because looking at React’s visible complexity (useMemo, useEffect - which apparently have changed names again since I last looked) - Vue has clearly chosen a superior API design.
stefanfisk 3 hours ago [-]
Unless I’m completely missing something, those hooks still have the same names and semantics as always?
lwansbrough 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah you’re actually right I was looking at the API section instead of the Hooks section. Perhaps another demonstration of React’s verbose API surface.
synergy20 4 hours ago [-]
I'm using Vue and do not feel it's becoming react
lwansbrough 3 hours ago [-]
This sentiment only really applies if you’re coming from
Vue 1/2 to Vue 3. The Composition API is definitely more like React but makes some better design decisions that make it easier to work with than React. Such as implicit reactivity.
9dev 51 minutes ago [-]
If anything, composition API has taken the good parts from React. Once you get the hang of it, it’s amazing. Everything clicks together, is easily composable, and fully typed-safe.
sevenzero 35 minutes ago [-]
Yup I'd sign this. We use Vue2 in a old codebase with options API and composition API in new projects. Both feel way better than anything I ever had to do with React (how many Hooks do you have to learn by now? 13?)
Vue just has a very simple lifecycle and combined with a simple store like Pinia it's just really fun to work with.
beering 3 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Like you, I went from hand-written cgi-bin html to jquery to angular v1 to React. I will willingly reach for React as a tool - it does what I want to do.
ricardonunez 5 hours ago [-]
I like react over angular and vue over react.
synergy20 4 hours ago [-]
same here thus I'm with vue
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
We are very far away from Angular 1.0 days, and not every single website needs JavaScript.
kcrwfrd_ 1 hours ago [-]
As someone who went through that same journey, agreed.
Compared to previous paradigms, React lets you compose complexity and rich interactivity really, really well.
dwd 3 hours ago [-]
React was a major improvement over Backbone + Marionette. Pre-jQuery was a shit-show as they hadn't even standardised the DOM.
Before that was XMLHttpRequest (particularly during my .Net WebForm days) and even had to use the ActiveXObject in IE that predated JSON.
strictnein 1 hours ago [-]
Give me Backbone + anything over React. Backbone was the last time I really felt close to the web page I was creating.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
XML, XMLHttpRequest, and XSLT in IE 5 was peak web dev for me. Never been more productive.
biinjo 2 hours ago [-]
Oh boy the ActiveXObject brings back some ~~ptsd~~ fond memories.
veryfancy 5 hours ago [-]
Chesterton’s framework.
shermantanktop 5 hours ago [-]
That’s right — the outcome is path-dependent. If we knew then what we know now, surely we’d have gotten over the idea that the web is DOM-documents-plus-REST-plus-JS-handlers-everywhere.
A lot of people did and do like that idea — I like it too — but it’s woefully inadequate for making rich web apps that a team of average devs can handle.
ndc 5 hours ago [-]
Wait, react is a framework now? People used to say that react is just a model binding library. FYI I haven't used react.
darkwi11ow 16 minutes ago [-]
Yep, react is indeed a library. Part of the confusion comes from a fact that
react community was keen to hijack "react" name and slap it onto their own
projects, for example there were react router, react query, react table, etc.,
so one could have get a feeling that react was like full-fledged framework, while most
of these "react" projects were not affiliated with react the library in any way.
fishtoaster 5 hours ago [-]
"React is actually a library, not a framework" is definitely a thing people have said here and there since its inception. It's a distinction that doesn't seem to buy anything in terms of explanatory power or clarity, so I tend to ignore it.
ndc 4 hours ago [-]
I think it's a shortcut for saying that react doesn't have an 'official' routing library (like vue-router) and state management library (like vue's pinia). So depending on what you choose to manage routing / state, one react app can be quite different from another.
Maybe nowadays there is a set of popular libraries for react so it becomes framework-y?
9dev 33 minutes ago [-]
Vue-Router and Pinia have always been optional add-ons for Vue too, however, yet the Vue ecosystem seemed to to fine without those "aaakshually“ kinds of people that feel the need to micro-manage other people’s speech.
vkou 5 hours ago [-]
Generally the difference between a library and a framework is that you can use bits and pieces of a library to add functionality to your project.
A framework expects most of your project to be shoehorned into it.
Whether something is one or the other depends on which of the two most users are doing. It's not a very interesting argument, though, because debating semantics is the worst use of the limited time you have on this planet.
bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago [-]
you can use React like a library, but I have never really seen it done.
paulddraper 3 hours ago [-]
Depends on the definition.
jQuery isn’t a “framework” either, at least not like Angular or Vue, though it can be extended with “plugins.”
Both jQuery and React are foundational technologies, so comparison is valid.
paulddraper 3 hours ago [-]
jQuery isn’t exactly a “framework” either, at least not like Angular or Vue, though it can be extended with “plugins.”
Both jQuery and React are foundational technologies, and comparison is valid.
tcfhgj 5 hours ago [-]
What about Angular 2+?
jamesrr39 1 hours ago [-]
I tried Angular 2+ back in the day. I found it frustrating to learn as the API had changed between versions, and when searching for help you would come across a blog post/stackoverflow answer, start implementing it and realise it didn't work in the version of Angular your project was in. Frustrating.
Tried React afterwards, this frustration didn't really exist and it was much easier to pick up.
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
The frustation is pretty much there under Vercel's stewardship, especially when React comes in the shape of Next.js.
It is apps or pages, which supports what, what new use cases is "use..." now for, ....
cube00 1 hours ago [-]
After the disaster of AngularJS that we are still paying external EOL support on, I will never trust another Google led framework.
microflash 4 hours ago [-]
Angular 2+ is equally horrible. Having spent 6 years on various versions of Angular, their migration story time and again has been an incredible pain.
These days I use web components for component writing and frameworks to handle routing, state management, bundling, and so on.
queenkjuul 4 hours ago [-]
I never wanna use anything but Svelte ever again, honestly.
wg0 5 hours ago [-]
I was a big Sevelte fan. After writing a sizeable application in Sevelte I realized that React is superior in every way overall speaking and at least you're writing 100% pure JavaScript directly. Or Typescript.
Plus the ecosystem. It's huge. Nothing comes closer.
gobdovan 5 hours ago [-]
You might be interested in solid.js. To me, it's easier to work with than React. What I like about it is that the reactivity model is small enough that you can understand it, and even implement a basic version yourself.
It also uses JSX, but since there's no virtual DOM, you can also write 100% JS, but, unlike React, you can do it without any special wrapper. So you don't need to use or write a `react-dnd`, just use any vanilla drag and drop library.
skew-aberration 3 hours ago [-]
I've tried solid and it's much nicer on small projects. How well does it scale though? Modern React is also 'more functional' (for some definition) but it comes at a cost of cumbersome and leaky abstractions. Classic React walked a fine line of being 'just reactive enough'. You could make code declarative and composable while still micromanaging certain lifecycle and data dependency decisions that can be critical for performance.
MrJohz 1 hours ago [-]
I've built quite complex applications (e.g. a spreadsheet app) using SolidJS as a base layer, and in that sense it scales really well. It's very easy to separate data management from the UI, so architecturally it scales well, and performance-wise we rarely had issues with it at all.
The biggest issue is in finding people to work with it. If you're hiring React developers over web developers, they will probably struggle more with SolidJS's differences from React, in part because they just look so similar that there's more to "unlearn". But most web developer (i.e. anyone who can understand beyond just the confines of their favourite framework) should find it relatively easy to understand what's going on.
gobdovan 45 minutes ago [-]
Implementing spreadsheets with fine-grained reactivity is basically cheating.
gobdovan 48 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
tcfhgj 5 hours ago [-]
Could you expand on your experience compared to react?
buzzerbetrayed 3 hours ago [-]
> 100% pure JavaScript directly
How did the React community convince so many people of this falsehood? Do that many people just not know what javascript is? It baffles me that one could look at JSX and be like, “that right there is vanilla javascript”.
lwansbrough 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah man it’s pure JS trust me just add this little transpiler and you’re good to go. What do you mean you don’t have a bundler?
kristiandupont 2 hours ago [-]
What people mean is obviously that you use JS primitives for looping, branching, conditionals, etc. over some DSL. Everybody knows that the tags are added syntax, there is no conspiracy here.
saghm 1 hours ago [-]
"These burgers are pure beef! Obviously what people mean is that beef is one of the ingredients. Everyone knows that the plastic is added in, there's no conspiracy here"
> React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried.
> React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.
I strongly believe it's because of trying to achieve the wrong goal with the wrong tool. So many websites could just be bare html pages and forms with just a sprinkle of JS for some interactivity, but they want to add JS for whatever reason.
If you can have a complete repo browser without JS (cgit), most web applications can survive without it too.
hajile 3 hours ago [-]
There are four culprits here and neither is due to JS.
First is the pursuit of polish. Each extra 1% in polish adds tons and tons of lines of code. If you want that level of polish on a non-SPA, you'll still have to add all that code then reload it one page at a time. I see a lot of these "bare HTML pages" and they are lacking important stuff like i18n/a11y/WCAG compliance. Try adding all that back in and you'll see your website bloat right up.
Second is bloated do-everything libraries. Ant, MUI, Mantine, or whatever else is aimed to be a superset of all possible website needs which means that the components you adopt have tons of features and bloat you don't need that slow down loading, parsing, and execution. Simply replacing that <Paper> component with a <div> and a few lines of CSS will get you the same thing you want, but will save you layers of unnecessary React components and sometimes a layer or two of unneeded DOM nodes as well that were added because the <Paper> component had weird interactions with some other component.
Third is manpower/experience. Many/most JS devs today (sad to say) don't actually know how to make that simple <Paper> component on their own. Those that do often skip it because they've got too much to do already. I've lost count of the number of teams I've seen where a bog-standard backend has 25 people working on stuff while the frontend team has 3x as many total lines of code (which are often times handling human-computer interaction issues the backend couldn't even imagin), but only 3-4 people to maintain it all.
Fourth is of course management. Designs on the backend change at a trickle while changes to the frontend arrive in a torrent. Understaffed frontend teams can't keep up with all the things shoved on their plate, so they usually can't optimize things even if they know how (eg, only a small percentage of SPA actually know/take the time to lazy load various parts of their apps to improve load time).
Fix these things and the SPA performance will improve drastically and almost certainly exceed BE templates with some jQuery spaghetti.
bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago [-]
>I see a lot of these "bare HTML pages" and they are lacking important stuff like i18n/a11y/WCAG compliance. Try adding all that back in and you'll see your website bloat right up.
having lots of JavaScript tends to make more WCAG problems, because you do interactive stuff that needs to be described. Having bare HTML and the accessibility that is required for that is not tending to bloat in my experience.
hajile 3 hours ago [-]
Users need interactive stuff. If your site isn't interactive and your competitor's site IS interactive, customers almost certainly will prefer your competitor.
When you try to chain that stuff across multiple backend-rendered pages, you get a whole other list of problems. If you need to track all the otherwise transient UI stuff on the BE, you have now created a whole mess of stateful APIs and turned horizontal scaling into a much bigger issue than it needed to be.
skydhash 32 minutes ago [-]
Users wants something that will help with whatever they want done. And the quicker, the better. Interactivity is nice, but I never seen anyone complains about multipages applications.
> If you need to track all the otherwise transient UI stuff on the BE
So don’t add transient stuff? You send a page or a form according to the URL, the user does whatever it wants and either request a new page or submit the form. Each page is standalone like activities in an Android app. Anything transient is taken care of on the client side.
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
Exactly, for most websites out there classical webserver rendering does the job pretty well. Even fancy animations can be taken care by pure CSS.
fishtoaster 5 hours ago [-]
Sounds like your argument is with SPAs, not React in particular?
lambdaone 4 hours ago [-]
SPAs are a monster that grew and grew; an idea that at first seemed like a clever optimization has generated huge and complex systems that are a nightmare to work with, and are bloated, slow and insecure.
Web components are the next big idea. I hope they have a chance to work.
buzzerbetrayed 3 hours ago [-]
> Web components are the next big idea. I hope they have a chance to work.
This comment could work equally well in any of the past 15 years. And for all we know, any of the next 15.
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
Angular supports web components as first class, as do frameworks like Blazor.
It is mostly the React crowd that dislikes them.
onemoresoop 4 hours ago [-]
I hate spas everywhere too but if you needed to build one for valid reasons React is probably a good bet due to large ecosystem and adoption. I personally avoided React as much as I could and luckily I won’t have to have to work with it.
hieKVj2ECC 16 minutes ago [-]
After spending so long writing React code, I'm now working on a large Vue project at work. Everyone used to say Vue was the easier of the two, the more approachable option — but I'm starting to see it differently. React, in its elegance, gives you components that are essentially just functions — and beyond that, there's not much more to it (setting aside the whole Next.js ecosystem). It's the most elegant thing I've encountered in frontend development.
Vue, on the other hand, feels like a jumble. You can tell it was clearly adopted and glorified by backend developers who didn't want to properly learn JavaScript — and what emerged is this awkward mashup that never quite coheres into something clean.
pibaker 4 hours ago [-]
Of course people do. No one is forced to use React or any other web framework unlike how they are practically forced to use JavaScript, and yet React wins. This should be enough evidence that people like it enough, at least more than most other frameworks out there.
It is also somewhat ironic that until late 2010s a common complaint about web development is how fast it changes and how many new things are coming up all the times. It was a very valid complaint, of course. But then when the React monoculture rose to the top, and everyone decides to complain about how that sucks instead. You really can't win.
r0m4n0 3 hours ago [-]
I have never been able to pick the framework and libraries for my day job. I’m almost always working on something someone started years prior or bound to an organization that has strict choices. Personally I wouldn’t pick react :)
React wins because it has become a default choice and folks like what’s comfortable to their preferences
curtisblaine 1 hours ago [-]
React wins because it has a predictable interface that has become industry standard. Industry standard saves money. Not everything must be creative.
pjmlp 58 minutes ago [-]
Not very predicatble with Vercel ownership.
pjmlp 59 minutes ago [-]
On the contrary, I am forced to use React and Next.js as many SaaS vendors have partnerships with Vercel, and only make extension points available with them.
If I want anything else, I have to implement the integrations myself, search for some open source project that has already done it, or ask AI.
Doable on hobby projects, unthinkable in professional settings.
manlymuppet 1 hours ago [-]
More than React, I'm interested in the question of how to best write UI through code, in general.
Even though I'm a fan of React, and use it for practically every web application I build, my biggest and most obvious issue has been that writing UIs through React doesn't feel as natural as, say, writing command line tools in Go, or live/realtime apps in Elixir.
Some languages just feel incredibly natural and frictionless for certain things, and nobody has really nailed UIs yet. Swift, JSX/HTML, Svelte, or whatever framework of the week: they all feel like they're working around the problem to some extent. Like at some point in the process, the designers of the language/framework had to compromise and implement some hacky/weird/painful syntax to satisfy project requirements.
UI's natural interface is visual, so tools like Figma can serve as an essential part of the solution, but nonetheless, I feel there's something missing. There must be a more intuitive way to represent the visual through code. The current solutions, although I find it hard to describe precisely, are always tantalizingly lacking in one way or another.
moojacob 5 hours ago [-]
I like React. And I have seriously tried the HTMX/Hotwire camp.
I wanted to make a back button use browser APIs to go back if the coming from the inbox, just link to the inbox otherwise to preserve scrolling. I had to wire the actions from the html to call the function that goes back, then in my controller determine the previous page and send the JS enabled back button or the hard link. My logic was spread out over 3 files!
With React I can have js in a component determine if the previous page was inbox, and based on that value show the back button JSX or the link. ALL IN ONE FILE. One conceptually entity for me to model vs 3 that do other things and this functionally is hammered in.
Is it slower? Definitely. But it makes me happy. Miserable in a corporate React slopbase? Blame your coworkers, it would definitely be worse without it.
petcat 5 hours ago [-]
> I wanted to make a back button use browser APIs to go back if the coming from the inbox, just link to the inbox otherwise to preserve scrolling. I had to wire the actions from the html to call the function that goes back, then in my controller determine the previous page and send the JS enabled back button or the hard link.
This is why I hate react spas. They're always trying to find some stupid way to break my browsers back button and navigation buttons.
I will always prefer htmx/server rendering with native everything (except the occasional form boosting.)
anon7000 17 minutes ago [-]
It’s an absolutely not true that react is especially bad for this behavior.
I think that lots of more traditional websites have very poor back button designs, especially around editing and form submissions. Remember clicking back and the browser prompting for form resubmission? Very poor design since you have no clue how the server will even handle form submissions. Or getting stuck deep in an application, hard to get back to the root. Or, consider encoding current page data that you’re editing into the URL, and back buttons don’t return to root and just strip query params. Often a very frustrating experience.
Often, “go back to what I was doing before” is what I actually want, not “go strictly to the previous state in the URL bar.”
Sure, plenty of people mess that up too, but the reality is that controlling the navigation stack can help you build more useful designs.
kcrwfrd_ 51 minutes ago [-]
They are actually speaking to trying to make an in-app back button use the history stack so that it _doesn’t_ “break” your browser’s back button.
The problem with just calling history.back() with no fallback is it will bounce users out of your app (back to Google or wherever they came from) and PMs won’t like that…
zarzavat 33 minutes ago [-]
`history.back()` shouldn't even exist, it's almost never correct to use it instead of a logical back button that works on the logical navigation structure e.g. going up a level, or to the previous page, etc.
For example, if you are on Page 5, then pressing "back" inside the app should always take you to Page 4. `history.back()` could take you to any page, it's unpredictable.
kcrwfrd_ 18 minutes ago [-]
It’s really common that you can arrive on a view from different places.
For example on instagram you might click through to a post from the explore page or from someone sending it to you via DM. In either case pressing the back button rendered in the app, or swiping back, will take you back to where you came from. It feels natural and seamless. Although I guess there are other ways to skin that cat than history.back()
But I agree with you when there’s a clear hierarchy. Like on a job ad a “back” button should just be a normal link to the index of job openings.
jeroenhd 2 hours ago [-]
That's not a react thing, it happened before React was even a thing. It's just self-centered website programmer design.
imperio59 5 hours ago [-]
This has been a non issue when using proper routing libraries that push history entries on the stack properly and render routes from the top of the component tree down.
You hate BAD react SPAs that break the fundamentals of how the web works. Good ones take care to not do that.
React fundamentally doesn't cause this issue either. You can use a different framework than react or even vanilla JS and still produce the same bugs.
Zanfa 4 hours ago [-]
> You hate BAD react SPAs that break the fundamentals of how the web works.
But that’s all of them? If Github, Reddit, LinkedIn and Facebook and others are unable to build SPAs that don’t constantly break the fundamentals while also choking the browser, maybe it is a tech problem.
charcircuit 4 hours ago [-]
If the APIs are too hard to use properly that no site can use it right, then it's a browser issue.
Zanfa 4 hours ago [-]
It’s not that. The sort of issues all of the above have caused are fundamental, eg not using anchor tags for navigation. It’s not in any way easier to use a button or div with an onclick handler. It’s also not easier to serve megabytes of JS to render 5kb of comments.
3eb7988a1663 5 hours ago [-]
Sure, but the internet is majority bad SPAs vs good ones. Rarely am I delighted by a SPA, but suffer through how poorly it works in bad network conditions, usable back buttons, or otherwise respecting the user.
evolve-maz 4 hours ago [-]
My advice would be to only use HTMX for data state related operations. For something like an intelligent back button, unless it depends on resource state do not use the backend to calculate it.
The recommended htmx way would be to hook up an onclick button to inline js or if you dislike that, a function called goBackOrInbox. It can then be something like:
function goBackOrInbox() {
if (document.referrer) {
const path = new URL(document.referrer).pathname;
if (path.startsWith('/inbox')) {
history.back();
return;
}
}
window.location.href = '/inbox';
}
And if you use that pattern a lot then you can parameterise the function with whatever the route should be.
altbdoor 5 hours ago [-]
I know there will probably be some complications here and there, but this could be done with Web Components too, right?
kcrwfrd_ 38 minutes ago [-]
Yes you could, or even just a vanilla DOM event handler on a button click.
The problem is that you cannot introspect the browser’s history with the history API. So you have to hack your way around that if you want the “go back in history if possible, otherwise navigate to fallback url” behavior. Which I guess is easier if you’re in a react SPA. Or if you’re fully a MPA and can just check document.referrer
There’s a brand new Navigation API that does let you introspect history entries from the same origin, which perfectly addresses the issue.
Came to ask this myself. Oddly enough, I think they’ve kind of slipped under everyone’s radar.
ChiperSoft 28 minutes ago [-]
I used to absolutely love react. Then I spent two years breaking apart a monolithic SPA into a bunch of federated micro frontends, and I saw the darkside of where React monoculture can go. When your entire website runs in the framework, complexity goes through the roof.
After I was laid off I realized that what I actually loved about react was JSX components, so I wrote a template engine on top of JSX and started doing server side rendering in my own apps. It's a quiet life
sheepscreek 4 hours ago [-]
Yes! It is hands-down, the most intuitive interface, that has successfully married declarative and imperative styles together. IMO, nothing comes close to JSX across the length and breadth of UI frameworks across all languages.
MrBuddyCasino 3 hours ago [-]
If it is so intuitive, why then does basically every React app contain performance bugs?
Rohansi 2 hours ago [-]
What does being intuitive have to do with software optimization? You can write poorly performing code for anything. Most people never touch profilers.
MrBuddyCasino 2 hours ago [-]
The same kind of bugs don’t happen in Vue because the framework handles them for you.
anon7000 13 minutes ago [-]
Maybe fair maybe not, but definitely unrelated to how intuitive it is.
bsimpson 3 hours ago [-]
Flutter, SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose: a whole lot of other platforms have been implementing React as their UI framework
pjmlp 56 minutes ago [-]
No they are implementing Functional Reactive Programming, it isn't the same thing, even though common folks would say React.
I wouldn't say Compose UI/Flutter/SwiftUI are "implementing React", but if your point is that other platforms have better solutions than JSX (plus all the bloat React adds to applications), I absolutely agree.
throwaway2037 16 minutes ago [-]
This is my favourite quote (and I write this as someone with no experience with HTML frameworks):
> How to build a counter component using the HTML Framework in just 1 line of code
> Locate your /node_modules folder and drag it to the trash bin.
> Scott Jehl
> 5th October 2024
outlore 18 minutes ago [-]
A post about React?! Nature is healing
vjeux 5 hours ago [-]
I'm biased because I was part of the people that made it happen but yeah, I love React. Before that, I would try everything under the sun to fix the issues I was having doing front-end. But since React came out, I don't have this need anymore. I can just focus on building stuff.
jdw64 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
suis_siva 1 hours ago [-]
One of the talks I really enjoyed is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9SDuTSy7ps. In my experience, React's architecture is really good and lends itself quite well to making large applications.
Unfortunately, React's biggest problem is that it forces you into the JS/TS ecosystem, which is, without a doubt in my mind, a compilation target rather than a system I wish to interact with natively.
I'm happy with Elm -- the community is really small, and sometimes you have to roll your own libraries. TEA is sometimes... unnatural (coming from React), but the fact that you do not have to worry about implicit and unexpected state (see useEffect), I always get excited to work with Elm.
Additionally, Claude seems to manage itself better in Elm than in React, at least within large, scary codebases.
0x6c6f6c 33 minutes ago [-]
I like TEA but don't fully grasp how it scales for apps that may have reusable components or sufficiently complex pages. Is there an agreed-upon way(s) to deal with this? I know state is a big NO so it seems a bit at odds, but also does this essentially mean all Elm apps are just a global Redux and React app with no effects? Curious about more details to what you enjoy and how you like to work in Elm. Links also perfectly fine too.
qsera 5 hours ago [-]
ELM forever!
I like ELM because the core is extremely small. You just have to remember the model, the update function and the message type. That is it.
React on the other hand makes you remember a million conventions and patterns and api like useEffect, useState, hooks.
adzm 5 hours ago [-]
React is great honestly. It's a simple mental model. Hooks are fun and compose well. JSX makes sense: Astro is a great example of how something that is certainly not react still has react-like syntax and is immediately accessible to anyone with react experience.
shikck200 1 hours ago [-]
There is many "like react" things out there. I avoid full fledged frameworks like the pest, but something like solid.js is probably the one that matches how i think of webdev.
kenanfyi 1 hours ago [-]
I think so, because it's created in Meta, thus having a huge developer base already and spread its way out of there. If you earn your life writing it, because your employer forces you to do so and you never try other stuff that long, you end up liking it.
I have never found the idea of having a Virtual DOM and diffing in runtime a good solution to the problem, maybe that's why I never liked React. I mean if you are writing a lot of code, have an enormous build step already and use a bloated library, why not have it compiled too anyway. That's why I like the thinking behind Svelte.
martin-adams 54 minutes ago [-]
React was one of those ways of building software that gave me back the giddy excitement I had learning Visual Basic as a kid.
It’s hard to explain, but the way everything was encapsulated as a component just clicked for me and suddenly the whole app could be composed.
I think it was when they introduced functional components. And when it comes to hooks, I love them.
Not to say other frameworks didn’t do the same, there was something special about React.
TheRoque 4 hours ago [-]
I use Angular 2+, and I find it quite pleasant to use. I also like how they make the framework evolve. Not scared to have opinions (back when it came out, Typescript was barely a thing). Never got into React (but didn't try that hard to get into it), but it seems like it's a huge bloated mess.
rtpg 3 hours ago [-]
I kinda like react with hooks but I do miss Angular 1 watches. Explicit watch expressions solve a loooot of spurious rerendering nonsense that makes for a lot of churn
Ultimately I think React makes it too hard for the performant solution to be used. And then tries to handwave it all away with “the react compiler solves/will solve it”. Don’t even get me started on “useMemo is not semantics” rationalization. First time runs actually matter when working on a performant UI!
DOM ops are expensive but your little bespoke function component code is also expensive when some hook leads to recalcs all over.
gdotdesign 2 hours ago [-]
Initially I didn't see the value in React. I thought that the whole virtual DOM compiling on every change was a waste of resources instead of just doing the change itself directly.
But as it turns out it's a great abstraction worth using for the right things (not every part of the web) and one of those are Single Page Applications.
A lot of comments here are about people linking JSX instead of React and that's a good abstraction too. In Mint (https://mint-lang.com/) I'm trying to create a language for SPAs and having HTML syntax helps.
cadamsdotcom 3 hours ago [-]
> Critical Security Vulnerability in React Server Components
RSC isn’t React.
> Next.js 15.1+ is unusable outside of Vercel
Next.js isn’t React.
By contrast to nextjs, React + Vite is quite a nice combo. Maybe Bun or Deno are also good? But nextjs and RSC should be kept separate from the discussion.
With React I find there is usually a clear and simple way to achieve what you want, and while it doesn’t perform super well, my customers get more value from a maintainable codebase than a fast one - because I can add features faster.
rk06 3 hours ago [-]
why is RSC not considered react? it is designed by core React team, and heavily recommended by core React team. and needs deep support from react.
jamesrr39 1 hours ago [-]
Subjective depending on who you ask, but for me RSC is not really representative of React usage. (I believe) the vast majority of React apps (and the vast majority of dev experience in React) are front end only. I have been writing React in some form for 8+ years, but never touched RSC.
pjmlp 54 minutes ago [-]
It is, especially in big corps doing MACH with SaaS products, deploying into Vercel.
cadamsdotcom 2 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t mean you have to use it.
nicce 1 hours ago [-]
> Next.js isn’t React.
But it seems becoming. Many React maintainers are on Vercel's payroll and Next.js is also defining where React is going.
z3ratul163071 2 hours ago [-]
this a million times. the next.js intermixing of backend / frontend code is a security nightmare.
altbdoor 5 hours ago [-]
I read one post before that really resonates with me, couldn't recall from where though:
You love JSX, you don't love React
Many of the jobs in my location requires React though, so I have to tolerate it somehow.
kccqzy 5 hours ago [-]
I’m the opposite. I loved React (before its hook madness) but I hated JSX. I’ve been using a lispy language to write React since it first came out. Initially went with someone’s pet project and eventually switched to ClojureScript. If you are already tolerating a build tool to transform your code into a form browsers can run, why not switch to a better language that’s designed for nested tree structures?
altbdoor 5 hours ago [-]
Interesting to know. Personally I've also been trying out other library/frameworks, like Vue, AlpineJS, or just plain server side rendering.
I have heard a little about ClojureScript here and there. Will take a look at it when I am free!
joshuat 5 hours ago [-]
"Does Anybody Actually Like ____" is such HN engagement bait
mindcrime 4 hours ago [-]
Ask HN: "Does Anybody Actually Like HN Engagement Bait"?
llbbdd 3 hours ago [-]
React, too. React or Electron in a submission title is like free money here, like throwing pellets into a koi pond.
p1necone 5 hours ago [-]
I like react if I'm the one writing all the code. But it's too easy to write something an order of magnitude more complex than it needs to be if you don't know what you're doing. And just easy enough to maintain that complexity that you never realise you're doing something wrong.
throwaway2037 46 minutes ago [-]
Hat tip to the article's subtitle:
> A cherry-picked collection of React (and React-tainted) criticism.
I appreciate the honesty up front!
Hfuffzehn 2 hours ago [-]
I haven't really deeply thought about frontend JS for many years.
Back then the question we were looking at was whether it would be good idea to move away from SAP UI5.
The alternatives back then where React, Angular and Vue.
The conclusion we came to was that it was definitely worth to migrate, but to what was not so easy to agree on.
Right now I am working with a legacy Java codebase that was based on RxJava.
And every single day I am cursing the people that made that decision.
It seems so obviously a bad idea.
And the only thing that lets me keep my sanity is remembering that every decision only becomes obvious with hindsight.
So I guess the only thing I can contribute is that it could always be worse and sometimes making the bold and seemingly innovative decision comes back many years later to bite other people.
keyle 39 minutes ago [-]
It's called Stockholm syndrome...
niam 5 hours ago [-]
I like the React model of components being (ideally) a function of state, but I don't touch hooks where possible. And I don't use React itself when I can use the lighter Preact library instead, which provides signals as an escape hatch.
gobdovan 5 hours ago [-]
What would people answer if they'd be asked if they actually like Unix? Nobody programs in literal Unix, but there's a clear before and after Unix. In the same way, there's a schism between before and after React.
I personally like JSX quite a lot. Solid.js is a framework which uses JSX but drops the virtual DOM. Its creator has a course 'Reactivity with SolidJS' on Frontend masters. He's a compiler enthusiast and tells you quite a bit about how much he had to learn from the React project, which, to me, it put into perspective the kind of thinking React brought to frontend. I won't code in React myself, but I surely appreciate its massive influence on everything else.
domlebo70 5 hours ago [-]
I love it. Easy to write and understand
brikym 5 hours ago [-]
I like SvelteKit but frameworks are converging to have similar features. React has a compiler. Vue is doing away with VDOM and Svelte has 'Runes' which is a bit like Solid's signals.
c-smile 4 hours ago [-]
What if:
1. JS supports JSX literals so
let elDef = <div id="some">Text</div>;
will be compiled into
let elDef = ["div", {id:"some"}, ["Text"]];
2. We extend DOM API to accept such constructs:
element.append(elDef); // same thing as element.append("<div id=some>Text</div>");
element.prepend(elDef); // ditto
element.patch(elDef); // patch element's DOM by elDef
3. Add appropriate events: componentDidMount, componentWillUnmount, etc. for cases when tag in JSX (uppercased) resolves to a class or function.
4. Add render() support. A method that generates tree of elDef's. It gets called by append(),prepend() and patch().
And we will get native React implementation. This will be quite useful and allowed to marry React alike approach with WebComponents into single mechanism.
React seemed like a bad idea when it came out, and a much worse idea once I started using it day to day. All of my personal projects use Svelte, and I finally, blessedly applied for a job recently where Svelte was their frontend framework of choice. htmx also felt great the one time I used it.
HTML, CSS and a scripting language inly for progressive enhancement are such beautiful, pure ideas, and learning frontend at the height of the web standards movement made me a partisan of using these technologies as intended. But these days, doing it that way feels like building a house with Japanese joinery techniques.
shelled 5 hours ago [-]
I am assuming the idea is to talk about "react" pattern/idea as well, not just that JS framework, and no, I didn't read the article - after two quotes, I scrolled and realised there was no article to read.
For me, coding is feeling intuitive as a human being even when I am writing code for the computers (but also for other human beings who'll read and work on my code; not sure how much would that be post-LLM world but still...). React never felt intuitive or, say, natural to me. It "feels" upside down to me, a bit anachronistic (in some way). But as I have seen with many frameworks, or rather "paradigms", which become fashion in the end, "the tools in vogue" because that's what the largest population of coders use, this is what one usually has to use now. I was quite sad when I saw Jetpack Compose as an Android dev. Technically it had improvements over the XMLs no doubt but then seeing it was React was quite not great (at least not for me). But this is what it and one just deals with.
I wish the coding world wasn't obsessed with patterns, architectures, and the need to fit everything into something concretely established (or in vogue). I often see Frankensteins as results.
EFLKumo 5 hours ago [-]
Exactly what I want to say. Thank you.
operatingthetan 5 hours ago [-]
Everyone I know seemed to pretend to like React because it was an avenue for making money. In other words, it was popular, but not on its merits. Next.js was the same.
skybrian 4 hours ago [-]
I like JSX and I prefer Preact to React because it's smaller, but I haven't used React itself enough to know if I'm missing anything.
Currently I'm using hono/jsx, mostly on the server, which seems like an even simpler way to do it than Preact. The JSX looks pretty much the same.
beremaki 5 hours ago [-]
I did love React for freeing me from AngularJS and I fully bought in its idiosyncrasies.
But now I just use it to get paid cause it's the standard and I know it well. In my experience keeping a large React codebase simple requires some skills that are clearly not universal.
If I have the choice I use Svelte because reactivity is much easier with it and it includes most of what I need to focus on building things.
darkteflon 3 hours ago [-]
I’m not an FE engineer but have found myself working very closely with the whole stack recently, which includes an SPA. We use html, JavaScript, Alpine for reactivity and Supabase realtime subscriptions.
It seems … okay? I feel like I can reason about it. But I worry I’m missing something that’s going to come back and bite us later because we haven’t adopted a framework.
Roast my stack?
asp_hornet 2 hours ago [-]
Would be silly to rate your stack without knowing more about what it is and its constraint.
If I had to judge it based on this alone post alone:
Great, seems like a straight forward stack. Would happily work on it.
Only criticism, to get all the ergonomics out of alpine, you sometimes have to lax some CSP or use the CSP build. Not necessarily a deal breaker, it is what it is.
mfru 2 hours ago [-]
I think this is a very sane stack.
Will probably become a hassle when going planet-scale (tm), but I think for most use cases this should be fine.
Kuyawa 5 hours ago [-]
I will never change express, ejs and postgresql for my solo projects, even AI likes to deliver in express and ejs with less clutter, easy to read, easy to make cosmetic changes when needed. I've always lived by simplicity and so does AI.
pngwen 5 hours ago [-]
I like it just fine; so long as I am being paid to code with it. Would I use react otherwise? No. But then, I view all js work as strictly mercenary. I would never choose it willingly no matter what library sits on top of it.
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
No, it is forced upon me when SaaS vendors only support Next.js/React as official way to extend their product.
It is gotten weird after Vercel's take over development, with all the "use whatever", which is getting out of hand.
Also the whole functional spaghetti is bonkers.
4 hours ago [-]
pveierland 4 hours ago [-]
Shout-out to the React Compiler for those that have not tried it. It's very easy to configure and can automatically deal with many cases of useMemo / useCallback / memo to reduce boilerplate in code: https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler
atum47 5 hours ago [-]
I never liked React, but after working with it for several years, I got use to it. Specially JSX. Pretty neat to mix html and js in the same code. That actually inspired me to write tinyJS - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/tinyjs
Later I've a managed state, cause let's agree, it's pretty convenient to have UI updated after a change in the state.
Polarity 5 hours ago [-]
I used React back when it came out once or twice and knew, nah thats not it. It may be good for apps like Facebook. But on the other side, Facebook was slow and buggy af.
5 hours ago [-]
the__alchemist 5 hours ago [-]
It depends on application complexity. I will hit a threshold. Below: HTML + CSS + targeted JS. Above: React + npm + webpack + typescript.
futuredevtech 2 hours ago [-]
React is probably the most successful framework people constantly complain about.
nwah1 5 hours ago [-]
It is the standard, and is extremely flexible. It was probably the wrong framework for most use-cases, which are often just CRUD screens. But, we are in an AI world now, so probably Javascript in general and even Typescript is starting to become the wrong move. Programming languages and frameworks which offer a ton of guarantees is what you need, now. In my humble opinion.
bhy 5 hours ago [-]
Both Scala, Ocaml and some variant of Ocaml like PureScript target Javascript and even have library that wraps React. Worth to explore with AI.
simonw 4 hours ago [-]
It's interesting how all of the LLM tools seemed to default to React in 2024-2025, but this year I'm finding them much more likely to default to vanilla JS and HTML instead.
(Purely based on vibes, I do not have anything robust to back this up.)
VerifiedReports 4 hours ago [-]
It seems that LLM tools should make these frameworks unnecessary.
tail_exchange 5 hours ago [-]
I do like React. It's still my choice even after trying other tools (including HTMX).
slawton3 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, and I won't be convinced otherwise until there is an objectively better solution.
joeyguerra 2 hours ago [-]
Some people do, some people don't.
JSR_FDED 3 hours ago [-]
React removed the joy of web development from me.
Datastar brought it back.
neko_ranger 4 hours ago [-]
React really shines once you embrace graphql and have components pass graphql fragments upward so that components can easily query for the data it needs, and the backend only gets one query per view. React is really annoying if you're doing REST.
It didn't click until I saw a react+graphql project, and it makes sense why meta created react and graphql
FpUser 5 hours ago [-]
I see no point in React at all. Modern JS with HTML components is all I need. I use my own state management component (basically implementation of state machine with async reentrant publish subscribe). JS dynamically loads strictly on on-need basis so no need to suck all code on initial load. In the end my front-ends are tiny, no need for build / deploy / source map and all other BS steps) and super easy to debug.
arikrahman 5 hours ago [-]
I like React using by using Re-frame. It's a clever loophole to use Lisp while meeting requirements, making everyone happy.
shimman 5 hours ago [-]
Been using React before class components was a thing, it had its place in the sun but I truly believe react has now done more harm in holding the frontend community back than helping it.
It also doesn't help that every single react codebase will always be drastically different from one another. In fact the easiest way to know the date of a react project are the dependencies one chooses in package.json. IDK if that's good or bad, but when you see bootstrap + sass in ${current_year} it's not going to be a good time. Compare this to something like Go where most projects are quite similar. Never had issues jumping in completely new Go repos but react projects are always a massive gamble toward always sucking.
No solutions from me, I charge a premium working on react and there is no shortage of clients with garbage react projects needing help but can't imagine the waste of pure human effort put into maintaining such projects to begin with.
4 hours ago [-]
the_real_cher 5 hours ago [-]
Its bloat. You can do shadow dom and web components in modern native JS.
State library is prob all you need now.
cube00 56 minutes ago [-]
> State library is prob all you need now.
Hopefully if the signals standard proposal (TC39) gets up we may not even need state libraries soon.
5 hours ago [-]
donohoe 5 hours ago [-]
I’ve been lucky enough to avoid it. I’ve banned it at work as it is not the correct as preach for any of our work.
nurettin 2 hours ago [-]
I loved react in 2013 when it had the life cycle methods. Everything was deterministic, I knew what caused what where and when. Now every framework is a mess and I'm glad I won't have to learn anyone's crap anymore thanks to random code generators.
adjejmxbdjdn 1 hours ago [-]
I lived there idea of hooks when they were introduced.
But they’ve honestly not worked out.
React works have been a lot better if the React team has figured out what useEffect was supposed to be right at the beginning, or at least when they changed what it was supposed to be used for they documented that clearly instead of gaslighting devs into believing nothing has changed.
Also, hooks aren’t a thing. Each hook is its own API and concept. Grouping them under the umbrella term “hooks” gave the wrong impression that it was a single concept, but there’s No conceptual similarity between ushered, useState or useEffect. The only similarity are the restrictions on their use and nomenclature.
pjmlp 51 minutes ago [-]
In every single project I worked on using Next.js as a kind of full stack framework, eventually I need to do something on the FE as well, and end up debugging a spaghetti of useSomething() until I figure out where to actually implement what I need.
dvt 5 hours ago [-]
I always get downvoted when I say this, but React is imo the biggest piece of astroturfed garbage corpo-slopware in the history of software engineering. It achieved such ubiquitous status for a few reasons:
(1) The extreme boom of software engineering as a "get rich quick" career over the past 15 years, and it being the "default" framework for doing stuff on the web. It's so bad, in fact, that most developers these days don't even really understand the difference between a backend and a front-end. I've had to explain, from first principles, how cookies work. All these very important details are simplified or straight up buried by React and its ecosystem.
(2) The overall groupthink of engineers: a lot of us will weirdly become fixated on some framework, operating system, programming language and turn into absolute zealots. This has a long and storied history (Linux vs Windows, C++ vs Java, and so on, so it's nothing new). React just happened to capture a lot of the zeitgeist even though it was objectively the wrong tool to use for like 90% of use cases.
(3) Terrible alternatives. I mostly blame the W3C for this, as JQuery helpers (selectors, AJAX/websockets, etc.) should've been inducted in the DOM standard much earlier and because the W3C (and by extention, the ECMAscript committee) is essentially a beaureaucratic battleground for big tech[1], it's painfully slow to get anything passed, standards are all over the place, and everyone tries to push their own agenda (Google wants to track you, Facebook wants social stuff, Apple wants secure payments via fingerprints, etc.)
(4) The startup boom of the last 15 years or so. This has always been a bit of a problem, but a common trope has been (and still very much is): if it's good enough for "huge tech company," it's good enough for us. So you've had a ton of startups that have been built from the ground up on React and the sunken cost has always been too much to switch.
I do. Reading React is an uniform experience across all the codebases. You know what state is, what an effect is, what a rendering function is and what it looks like. You also know where code smells are, there's a whole section of eslint rules dedicated to that. Compare to hand-rolled frameworks, where everything is all over the place, and you have to navigate tons of indirection to understand the brilliant intuition du jour by some developer who was bored and wanted to inject a spark of creativity in their code. Give me predictability, and keep creativity for hobby stuff that nobody has to read.
cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
I like React.
I made sure that all of the interactions in our app that don't require a server round-trip are instant, without any annoying undead skeletons and animations. This works really well because we keep most of the data in RAM on the client, with IndexDB as the backing store and a custom synchronization protocol.
I avoided the "server-side rendering" out of a general distrust of "magic" solutions that do everything for you.
React itself is also really straightforward as a mental model of rendering.
Pxtl 5 hours ago [-]
No more or less than I do the rest of the js ecosystem.
sghiassy 5 hours ago [-]
Gets the job gone so I can focus on more important things
AI writes React well too
nsonha 1 hours ago [-]
I think mostly people like to have logical component with all the code in one place and not have to think about structuring css/html/js separately. Many people like react for jsx (surprisingly, because initially there was a lot of push back even in early react adoption).
Then they took it to the next level with things like styled-component. Virtual DOM is just an implementation detail and overrated to the success of React.
Any future web framework that solves that component thing and allow people to just write code instead of "web code", they'll win.
(I am aware that the web veterans don't like that view)
platevoltage 2 hours ago [-]
React is great, and really the only good thing Meta has ever done.
talkingtab 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure it is React I like. I like JSX.
Here is a fun thing.
Write a bunch of JSON. A lot. Now write a lot of JSX. Then convert the JSON to JSX. Then convert the JSX to JSON. I was surprised by how much easier it was for me to reason in JSX. I use threejs and react three fiber (r3f). Again the JSX type of representation easily wins out for me. I don't really understand why. Maybe JSX ends up being more pictorial - as in a picture is worth a thousand words?
So I'm not sure I even care of about React. I just reason better with JSX than with all the other crufty things (template, html, htmx, etc). And yes, find all of them including React crufty.
righthand 3 hours ago [-]
No
righthand 3 hours ago [-]
Not really.
colordrops 5 hours ago [-]
No, I prefer much lighter frameworks that are closer to web standards, such as LitElement, which is a relatively light wrapper around Web Component standards. yes, they are slightly clunky, but they work great without a build step. I just edit the code and reload the page, no need to worry about a 5MB bundle. Unless you are writing code that is deployed to a million users running on Nokia brick phone browsers, it works great.
saila 4 hours ago [-]
I have an Astro site that's mostly static with a couple interactive components. I recently converted the components from React to Lit and the result is so much simpler.
One of the things that was clunky in the React version was the use of setInterval. I had to write a hook in React and it just added this unnecessary layer of weirdness in how it all interacts[1]. In the Lit version, I just use setInterval normally and there's nothing extra to understand.
I like it, but only in its truest sense: A view library. Various parts of the ecosystem are horrible even if they don't pertain to react. I like jotai because its elegant as a global state library (React context has too much boilerplate).
But the thing is, React and others is useful only for a few specific cases, IMO. I would only feel the need for them if we're building truly interactive applications (Open Street Map, figma, a text editor,...), but only because they've taken care of the state management boilerplate (even if you're now boxed by their applications. But most apps on the web don't needs to be an SPA. They can actually be improved by being a multi page application with small islands of interactivity.
htsh 5 hours ago [-]
i much prefer svelte but the rest of the world does not
steve_taylor 5 hours ago [-]
I was all in on Svelte and SvelteKit until I started encountering CSS weirdness caused by a bug that the Svelte developers said is "by design", namely that components' CSS isn't removed from the document after the last instance of that component is no longer rendered. This resulted in a situation in which styles became dependent on the navigation path the user takes, leading to weird an unpredictable layout issues. I couldn't stomach solving this by using Tailwind.
Then Svelte 5 came along and made Svelte more like React. At first, there were just a few simple runes, but then the runes started proliferating like crazy to solve other runes' problems. At that point, Svelte was dead to me and I went back to React/Next.
The right path for Svelte to take would have been to continue to refine Svelte 4.
maxbond 5 hours ago [-]
Interesting, so if I'm understanding correctly, component A's style was supposed to change when component B was present, and this was implemented as styling rules in component B? Why was Tailwind necessary rather than moving these rules to component A (which I know would probably require some gnarly selectors)?
I don't want to be a "you should've double bagged it" guy, I'm just curious. Svelte is not the be all and all, if you moved on to greener pastures more power to you.
maxbond 5 hours ago [-]
There are dozens of us
jtbaker 5 hours ago [-]
Launching a new product in SvelteKit! Coming from Vue and it has been mostly great.
holler 4 hours ago [-]
I feel the same way about ember.js :]
sergiotapia 4 hours ago [-]
React was incredible right until the end of the class based react components. It all became fucky really quickly past that point. These days I feel React is a tool that is foisted upon me, not one I choose on technical merits.
slopinthebag 2 hours ago [-]
React is fine. The shit people add to it (including the React team!) sucks tho. Raw react is just declarative UI.
Server components, state management libraries, data fetching libraries, routers, etc, are horrible. Same with most UI libraries. They add so much overhead and complexity.
5 hours ago [-]
jdw64 4 hours ago [-]
I'm really sorry to say this, but I actually love React
AnonHP 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jocelyner 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
taintlord22 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
zarzavat 58 minutes ago [-]
People hate on React because it's popular. That popularity alienates people whose use cases aren't served well by React and they wonder what the fuss is about.
But React is really, really good at the thing it was designed for: building interactive UIs. You can even build native apps. Can you build a native app in htmx?
Most of the alternatives to React are simplifying alternatives. They aim to take complexity away in order to solve a subset of basic use cases with less ceremony. Sure, if you have uncomplicated needs then use whatever solves your problem, web components, HTMX, Jinja, plain HTML, markdown: go as low as you like down the hierarchy and choose the simplest thing that could possibly work.
But nobody as of yet has built an alternative to React that can solve the difficult use cases better than React. Au contraire, React has moved into domains that it was never even designed for. Native apps. Terminal apps. That's the power of a good abstraction.
React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried.
I'd take React over the Angular 1 days any time. I'd take Angular 1's full-bodied MVC over the "build it yourself from scratch every time" approach of Backbone. I'd take Backbone's minimal MVC structure over the classic JQuery Soup architecture. And I'd take JQuery's dom manipulations and standard-library improvements over the native apis (of that era) in an instant.
React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.
> article just about to turn three years old
JavaScript community never beating the allegations lol
The real discussion would be between React's vdom and something like Solid's signals.
It does have its own templating syntax, which is trivial to learn. No more cumbersome to learn than JSX, which is a templating language designed by the React team. Not sure why you chose to make the distinction between JSX and Vue’s DSL as if JSX wasn’t developed for the sole purpose of facilitating React’s virtual DOM.
Vue templates mean learning Vue's custom syntax for if statements, loops, dynamic attribute syntax (with its own gotcha), binding dot modifiers, data binding, and whatever else. It requires learning its entire custom directive system. It uses custom syntax for stuff like events too.
I don't see this as remotely comparable with Vue being much closer to something like my time working with Angular 1 (a time I'd rather not repeat).
Please explain React’s reactive data binding since it’s apparently much simpler than v-model=
;)
Vue's DSL is whatever language the developer implemented. Which is probably not enough, depends how much effort they put into it and how good they are in language design. Given that they cargo cult HTML tags to organize components in a pseudo-familiar but not-valid-HTML way, I don't have much confidence in their language design skills.
I'd take the former any day.
Vue just has a very simple lifecycle and combined with a simple store like Pinia it's just really fun to work with.
Compared to previous paradigms, React lets you compose complexity and rich interactivity really, really well.
Before that was XMLHttpRequest (particularly during my .Net WebForm days) and even had to use the ActiveXObject in IE that predated JSON.
A lot of people did and do like that idea — I like it too — but it’s woefully inadequate for making rich web apps that a team of average devs can handle.
Maybe nowadays there is a set of popular libraries for react so it becomes framework-y?
A framework expects most of your project to be shoehorned into it.
Whether something is one or the other depends on which of the two most users are doing. It's not a very interesting argument, though, because debating semantics is the worst use of the limited time you have on this planet.
jQuery isn’t a “framework” either, at least not like Angular or Vue, though it can be extended with “plugins.”
Both jQuery and React are foundational technologies, so comparison is valid.
Both jQuery and React are foundational technologies, and comparison is valid.
Tried React afterwards, this frustration didn't really exist and it was much easier to pick up.
It is apps or pages, which supports what, what new use cases is "use..." now for, ....
These days I use web components for component writing and frameworks to handle routing, state management, bundling, and so on.
Plus the ecosystem. It's huge. Nothing comes closer.
It also uses JSX, but since there's no virtual DOM, you can also write 100% JS, but, unlike React, you can do it without any special wrapper. So you don't need to use or write a `react-dnd`, just use any vanilla drag and drop library.
The biggest issue is in finding people to work with it. If you're hiring React developers over web developers, they will probably struggle more with SolidJS's differences from React, in part because they just look so similar that there's more to "unlearn". But most web developer (i.e. anyone who can understand beyond just the confines of their favourite framework) should find it relatively easy to understand what's going on.
How did the React community convince so many people of this falsehood? Do that many people just not know what javascript is? It baffles me that one could look at JSX and be like, “that right there is vanilla javascript”.
FYI: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/svelte
> React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.
I strongly believe it's because of trying to achieve the wrong goal with the wrong tool. So many websites could just be bare html pages and forms with just a sprinkle of JS for some interactivity, but they want to add JS for whatever reason.
If you can have a complete repo browser without JS (cgit), most web applications can survive without it too.
First is the pursuit of polish. Each extra 1% in polish adds tons and tons of lines of code. If you want that level of polish on a non-SPA, you'll still have to add all that code then reload it one page at a time. I see a lot of these "bare HTML pages" and they are lacking important stuff like i18n/a11y/WCAG compliance. Try adding all that back in and you'll see your website bloat right up.
Second is bloated do-everything libraries. Ant, MUI, Mantine, or whatever else is aimed to be a superset of all possible website needs which means that the components you adopt have tons of features and bloat you don't need that slow down loading, parsing, and execution. Simply replacing that <Paper> component with a <div> and a few lines of CSS will get you the same thing you want, but will save you layers of unnecessary React components and sometimes a layer or two of unneeded DOM nodes as well that were added because the <Paper> component had weird interactions with some other component.
Third is manpower/experience. Many/most JS devs today (sad to say) don't actually know how to make that simple <Paper> component on their own. Those that do often skip it because they've got too much to do already. I've lost count of the number of teams I've seen where a bog-standard backend has 25 people working on stuff while the frontend team has 3x as many total lines of code (which are often times handling human-computer interaction issues the backend couldn't even imagin), but only 3-4 people to maintain it all.
Fourth is of course management. Designs on the backend change at a trickle while changes to the frontend arrive in a torrent. Understaffed frontend teams can't keep up with all the things shoved on their plate, so they usually can't optimize things even if they know how (eg, only a small percentage of SPA actually know/take the time to lazy load various parts of their apps to improve load time).
Fix these things and the SPA performance will improve drastically and almost certainly exceed BE templates with some jQuery spaghetti.
having lots of JavaScript tends to make more WCAG problems, because you do interactive stuff that needs to be described. Having bare HTML and the accessibility that is required for that is not tending to bloat in my experience.
When you try to chain that stuff across multiple backend-rendered pages, you get a whole other list of problems. If you need to track all the otherwise transient UI stuff on the BE, you have now created a whole mess of stateful APIs and turned horizontal scaling into a much bigger issue than it needed to be.
> If you need to track all the otherwise transient UI stuff on the BE
So don’t add transient stuff? You send a page or a form according to the URL, the user does whatever it wants and either request a new page or submit the form. Each page is standalone like activities in an Android app. Anything transient is taken care of on the client side.
Web components are the next big idea. I hope they have a chance to work.
This comment could work equally well in any of the past 15 years. And for all we know, any of the next 15.
It is mostly the React crowd that dislikes them.
It is also somewhat ironic that until late 2010s a common complaint about web development is how fast it changes and how many new things are coming up all the times. It was a very valid complaint, of course. But then when the React monoculture rose to the top, and everyone decides to complain about how that sucks instead. You really can't win.
React wins because it has become a default choice and folks like what’s comfortable to their preferences
If I want anything else, I have to implement the integrations myself, search for some open source project that has already done it, or ask AI.
Doable on hobby projects, unthinkable in professional settings.
Even though I'm a fan of React, and use it for practically every web application I build, my biggest and most obvious issue has been that writing UIs through React doesn't feel as natural as, say, writing command line tools in Go, or live/realtime apps in Elixir.
Some languages just feel incredibly natural and frictionless for certain things, and nobody has really nailed UIs yet. Swift, JSX/HTML, Svelte, or whatever framework of the week: they all feel like they're working around the problem to some extent. Like at some point in the process, the designers of the language/framework had to compromise and implement some hacky/weird/painful syntax to satisfy project requirements.
UI's natural interface is visual, so tools like Figma can serve as an essential part of the solution, but nonetheless, I feel there's something missing. There must be a more intuitive way to represent the visual through code. The current solutions, although I find it hard to describe precisely, are always tantalizingly lacking in one way or another.
I wanted to make a back button use browser APIs to go back if the coming from the inbox, just link to the inbox otherwise to preserve scrolling. I had to wire the actions from the html to call the function that goes back, then in my controller determine the previous page and send the JS enabled back button or the hard link. My logic was spread out over 3 files!
With React I can have js in a component determine if the previous page was inbox, and based on that value show the back button JSX or the link. ALL IN ONE FILE. One conceptually entity for me to model vs 3 that do other things and this functionally is hammered in.
Is it slower? Definitely. But it makes me happy. Miserable in a corporate React slopbase? Blame your coworkers, it would definitely be worse without it.
This is why I hate react spas. They're always trying to find some stupid way to break my browsers back button and navigation buttons.
I will always prefer htmx/server rendering with native everything (except the occasional form boosting.)
I think that lots of more traditional websites have very poor back button designs, especially around editing and form submissions. Remember clicking back and the browser prompting for form resubmission? Very poor design since you have no clue how the server will even handle form submissions. Or getting stuck deep in an application, hard to get back to the root. Or, consider encoding current page data that you’re editing into the URL, and back buttons don’t return to root and just strip query params. Often a very frustrating experience.
Often, “go back to what I was doing before” is what I actually want, not “go strictly to the previous state in the URL bar.”
Sure, plenty of people mess that up too, but the reality is that controlling the navigation stack can help you build more useful designs.
The problem with just calling history.back() with no fallback is it will bounce users out of your app (back to Google or wherever they came from) and PMs won’t like that…
For example, if you are on Page 5, then pressing "back" inside the app should always take you to Page 4. `history.back()` could take you to any page, it's unpredictable.
For example on instagram you might click through to a post from the explore page or from someone sending it to you via DM. In either case pressing the back button rendered in the app, or swiping back, will take you back to where you came from. It feels natural and seamless. Although I guess there are other ways to skin that cat than history.back()
But I agree with you when there’s a clear hierarchy. Like on a job ad a “back” button should just be a normal link to the index of job openings.
You hate BAD react SPAs that break the fundamentals of how the web works. Good ones take care to not do that.
React fundamentally doesn't cause this issue either. You can use a different framework than react or even vanilla JS and still produce the same bugs.
But that’s all of them? If Github, Reddit, LinkedIn and Facebook and others are unable to build SPAs that don’t constantly break the fundamentals while also choking the browser, maybe it is a tech problem.
The recommended htmx way would be to hook up an onclick button to inline js or if you dislike that, a function called goBackOrInbox. It can then be something like:
function goBackOrInbox() { if (document.referrer) { const path = new URL(document.referrer).pathname; if (path.startsWith('/inbox')) { history.back(); return; } } window.location.href = '/inbox'; }
And if you use that pattern a lot then you can parameterise the function with whatever the route should be.
The problem is that you cannot introspect the browser’s history with the history API. So you have to hack your way around that if you want the “go back in history if possible, otherwise navigate to fallback url” behavior. Which I guess is easier if you’re in a react SPA. Or if you’re fully a MPA and can just check document.referrer
There’s a brand new Navigation API that does let you introspect history entries from the same origin, which perfectly addresses the issue.
I wrote a polyfill in order to take advantage of the navigation API for this exact problem: https://github.com/kcrwfrd/navigation-ponyfill
After I was laid off I realized that what I actually loved about react was JSX components, so I wrote a template engine on top of JSX and started doing server side rendering in my own apps. It's a quiet life
https://wiki.haskell.org/Functional_Reactive_Programming
Unfortunately, React's biggest problem is that it forces you into the JS/TS ecosystem, which is, without a doubt in my mind, a compilation target rather than a system I wish to interact with natively.
I'm happy with Elm -- the community is really small, and sometimes you have to roll your own libraries. TEA is sometimes... unnatural (coming from React), but the fact that you do not have to worry about implicit and unexpected state (see useEffect), I always get excited to work with Elm.
Additionally, Claude seems to manage itself better in Elm than in React, at least within large, scary codebases.
I like ELM because the core is extremely small. You just have to remember the model, the update function and the message type. That is it.
React on the other hand makes you remember a million conventions and patterns and api like useEffect, useState, hooks.
I have never found the idea of having a Virtual DOM and diffing in runtime a good solution to the problem, maybe that's why I never liked React. I mean if you are writing a lot of code, have an enormous build step already and use a bloated library, why not have it compiled too anyway. That's why I like the thinking behind Svelte.
It’s hard to explain, but the way everything was encapsulated as a component just clicked for me and suddenly the whole app could be composed.
I think it was when they introduced functional components. And when it comes to hooks, I love them.
Not to say other frameworks didn’t do the same, there was something special about React.
Ultimately I think React makes it too hard for the performant solution to be used. And then tries to handwave it all away with “the react compiler solves/will solve it”. Don’t even get me started on “useMemo is not semantics” rationalization. First time runs actually matter when working on a performant UI!
DOM ops are expensive but your little bespoke function component code is also expensive when some hook leads to recalcs all over.
But as it turns out it's a great abstraction worth using for the right things (not every part of the web) and one of those are Single Page Applications.
A lot of comments here are about people linking JSX instead of React and that's a good abstraction too. In Mint (https://mint-lang.com/) I'm trying to create a language for SPAs and having HTML syntax helps.
RSC isn’t React.
> Next.js 15.1+ is unusable outside of Vercel
Next.js isn’t React.
By contrast to nextjs, React + Vite is quite a nice combo. Maybe Bun or Deno are also good? But nextjs and RSC should be kept separate from the discussion.
With React I find there is usually a clear and simple way to achieve what you want, and while it doesn’t perform super well, my customers get more value from a maintainable codebase than a fast one - because I can add features faster.
But it seems becoming. Many React maintainers are on Vercel's payroll and Next.js is also defining where React is going.
I have heard a little about ClojureScript here and there. Will take a look at it when I am free!
Back then the question we were looking at was whether it would be good idea to move away from SAP UI5. The alternatives back then where React, Angular and Vue.
The conclusion we came to was that it was definitely worth to migrate, but to what was not so easy to agree on.
Right now I am working with a legacy Java codebase that was based on RxJava. And every single day I am cursing the people that made that decision. It seems so obviously a bad idea. And the only thing that lets me keep my sanity is remembering that every decision only becomes obvious with hindsight.
So I guess the only thing I can contribute is that it could always be worse and sometimes making the bold and seemingly innovative decision comes back many years later to bite other people.
I personally like JSX quite a lot. Solid.js is a framework which uses JSX but drops the virtual DOM. Its creator has a course 'Reactivity with SolidJS' on Frontend masters. He's a compiler enthusiast and tells you quite a bit about how much he had to learn from the React project, which, to me, it put into perspective the kind of thinking React brought to frontend. I won't code in React myself, but I surely appreciate its massive influence on everything else.
1. JS supports JSX literals so
will be compiled into 2. We extend DOM API to accept such constructs: 3. Add appropriate events: componentDidMount, componentWillUnmount, etc. for cases when tag in JSX (uppercased) resolves to a class or function.4. Add render() support. A method that generates tree of elDef's. It gets called by append(),prepend() and patch().
And we will get native React implementation. This will be quite useful and allowed to marry React alike approach with WebComponents into single mechanism.
1...4 is how it is implemented in my Sciter as the Reactor thing, see: https://docs.sciter.com/docs/Reactor/
HTML, CSS and a scripting language inly for progressive enhancement are such beautiful, pure ideas, and learning frontend at the height of the web standards movement made me a partisan of using these technologies as intended. But these days, doing it that way feels like building a house with Japanese joinery techniques.
For me, coding is feeling intuitive as a human being even when I am writing code for the computers (but also for other human beings who'll read and work on my code; not sure how much would that be post-LLM world but still...). React never felt intuitive or, say, natural to me. It "feels" upside down to me, a bit anachronistic (in some way). But as I have seen with many frameworks, or rather "paradigms", which become fashion in the end, "the tools in vogue" because that's what the largest population of coders use, this is what one usually has to use now. I was quite sad when I saw Jetpack Compose as an Android dev. Technically it had improvements over the XMLs no doubt but then seeing it was React was quite not great (at least not for me). But this is what it and one just deals with.
I wish the coding world wasn't obsessed with patterns, architectures, and the need to fit everything into something concretely established (or in vogue). I often see Frankensteins as results.
Currently I'm using hono/jsx, mostly on the server, which seems like an even simpler way to do it than Preact. The JSX looks pretty much the same.
But now I just use it to get paid cause it's the standard and I know it well. In my experience keeping a large React codebase simple requires some skills that are clearly not universal.
If I have the choice I use Svelte because reactivity is much easier with it and it includes most of what I need to focus on building things.
It seems … okay? I feel like I can reason about it. But I worry I’m missing something that’s going to come back and bite us later because we haven’t adopted a framework.
Roast my stack?
If I had to judge it based on this alone post alone:
Great, seems like a straight forward stack. Would happily work on it.
Only criticism, to get all the ergonomics out of alpine, you sometimes have to lax some CSP or use the CSP build. Not necessarily a deal breaker, it is what it is.
Will probably become a hassle when going planet-scale (tm), but I think for most use cases this should be fine.
It is gotten weird after Vercel's take over development, with all the "use whatever", which is getting out of hand.
Also the whole functional spaghetti is bonkers.
Later I've a managed state, cause let's agree, it's pretty convenient to have UI updated after a change in the state.
(Purely based on vibes, I do not have anything robust to back this up.)
It didn't click until I saw a react+graphql project, and it makes sense why meta created react and graphql
It also doesn't help that every single react codebase will always be drastically different from one another. In fact the easiest way to know the date of a react project are the dependencies one chooses in package.json. IDK if that's good or bad, but when you see bootstrap + sass in ${current_year} it's not going to be a good time. Compare this to something like Go where most projects are quite similar. Never had issues jumping in completely new Go repos but react projects are always a massive gamble toward always sucking.
No solutions from me, I charge a premium working on react and there is no shortage of clients with garbage react projects needing help but can't imagine the waste of pure human effort put into maintaining such projects to begin with.
State library is prob all you need now.
Hopefully if the signals standard proposal (TC39) gets up we may not even need state libraries soon.
But they’ve honestly not worked out.
React works have been a lot better if the React team has figured out what useEffect was supposed to be right at the beginning, or at least when they changed what it was supposed to be used for they documented that clearly instead of gaslighting devs into believing nothing has changed.
Also, hooks aren’t a thing. Each hook is its own API and concept. Grouping them under the umbrella term “hooks” gave the wrong impression that it was a single concept, but there’s No conceptual similarity between ushered, useState or useEffect. The only similarity are the restrictions on their use and nomenclature.
(1) The extreme boom of software engineering as a "get rich quick" career over the past 15 years, and it being the "default" framework for doing stuff on the web. It's so bad, in fact, that most developers these days don't even really understand the difference between a backend and a front-end. I've had to explain, from first principles, how cookies work. All these very important details are simplified or straight up buried by React and its ecosystem.
(2) The overall groupthink of engineers: a lot of us will weirdly become fixated on some framework, operating system, programming language and turn into absolute zealots. This has a long and storied history (Linux vs Windows, C++ vs Java, and so on, so it's nothing new). React just happened to capture a lot of the zeitgeist even though it was objectively the wrong tool to use for like 90% of use cases.
(3) Terrible alternatives. I mostly blame the W3C for this, as JQuery helpers (selectors, AJAX/websockets, etc.) should've been inducted in the DOM standard much earlier and because the W3C (and by extention, the ECMAscript committee) is essentially a beaureaucratic battleground for big tech[1], it's painfully slow to get anything passed, standards are all over the place, and everyone tries to push their own agenda (Google wants to track you, Facebook wants social stuff, Apple wants secure payments via fingerprints, etc.)
(4) The startup boom of the last 15 years or so. This has always been a bit of a problem, but a common trope has been (and still very much is): if it's good enough for "huge tech company," it's good enough for us. So you've had a ton of startups that have been built from the ground up on React and the sunken cost has always been too much to switch.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/software/2018/04/13/go-away-kid-...
I made sure that all of the interactions in our app that don't require a server round-trip are instant, without any annoying undead skeletons and animations. This works really well because we keep most of the data in RAM on the client, with IndexDB as the backing store and a custom synchronization protocol.
I avoided the "server-side rendering" out of a general distrust of "magic" solutions that do everything for you.
React itself is also really straightforward as a mental model of rendering.
AI writes React well too
Then they took it to the next level with things like styled-component. Virtual DOM is just an implementation detail and overrated to the success of React.
Any future web framework that solves that component thing and allow people to just write code instead of "web code", they'll win.
(I am aware that the web veterans don't like that view)
Here is a fun thing.
Write a bunch of JSON. A lot. Now write a lot of JSX. Then convert the JSON to JSX. Then convert the JSX to JSON. I was surprised by how much easier it was for me to reason in JSX. I use threejs and react three fiber (r3f). Again the JSX type of representation easily wins out for me. I don't really understand why. Maybe JSX ends up being more pictorial - as in a picture is worth a thousand words?
So I'm not sure I even care of about React. I just reason better with JSX than with all the other crufty things (template, html, htmx, etc). And yes, find all of them including React crufty.
One of the things that was clunky in the React version was the use of setInterval. I had to write a hook in React and it just added this unnecessary layer of weirdness in how it all interacts[1]. In the Lit version, I just use setInterval normally and there's nothing extra to understand.
[1] https://overreacted.io/making-setinterval-declarative-with-r...
But the thing is, React and others is useful only for a few specific cases, IMO. I would only feel the need for them if we're building truly interactive applications (Open Street Map, figma, a text editor,...), but only because they've taken care of the state management boilerplate (even if you're now boxed by their applications. But most apps on the web don't needs to be an SPA. They can actually be improved by being a multi page application with small islands of interactivity.
Then Svelte 5 came along and made Svelte more like React. At first, there were just a few simple runes, but then the runes started proliferating like crazy to solve other runes' problems. At that point, Svelte was dead to me and I went back to React/Next.
The right path for Svelte to take would have been to continue to refine Svelte 4.
I don't want to be a "you should've double bagged it" guy, I'm just curious. Svelte is not the be all and all, if you moved on to greener pastures more power to you.
Server components, state management libraries, data fetching libraries, routers, etc, are horrible. Same with most UI libraries. They add so much overhead and complexity.
But React is really, really good at the thing it was designed for: building interactive UIs. You can even build native apps. Can you build a native app in htmx?
Most of the alternatives to React are simplifying alternatives. They aim to take complexity away in order to solve a subset of basic use cases with less ceremony. Sure, if you have uncomplicated needs then use whatever solves your problem, web components, HTMX, Jinja, plain HTML, markdown: go as low as you like down the hierarchy and choose the simplest thing that could possibly work.
But nobody as of yet has built an alternative to React that can solve the difficult use cases better than React. Au contraire, React has moved into domains that it was never even designed for. Native apps. Terminal apps. That's the power of a good abstraction.