Author here. React’s absolutely mature—no question there, with a skilled team behind it. But the button example highlights something off: a single component outweighing an entire app feels fundamentally broken. There’s clear room for fresh alternatives, especially now. You can see it here on HN—seasoned devs wrestling with React’s wild complexity. Nue’s a stab at fixing that.
> a single component outweighing an entire app feels fundamentally broken
It just doesn't to me, understanding that in react-land, a single component and an entire app will have roughly equivalent size, if you're not pulling in any other dependencies.
No one (I hope) would ever use react for a single button, so it feels like an unhelpful comparison.
I don't think that is fundamentally broken. React is just not the right technology for a single button, and it's not trying to be.
If you tried to use photolitography (the technology used to print the circuits in microprocessors) to do tattoos... well it could probably work, but it would be highly inefficient and expensive and bad.
React is for complex web applications, and it I don't think it's a very valid criticism to say that it is bad for a different use case. To some extent, the React community may have over-promoted React as the final web-dev framework, but that's also a mistake.
In any case, kudos on creating Nue, looks really cool, I'll keep an eye on it ;)
> a single component outweighing an entire app feels fundamentally broken.
I think this is an overly dramatic take. Of course react has a fixed overhead. If all you're deploying is the single button, then that overhead is for no benefit. But the overhead gets amortized over your entire app, which most likely has thousands of components. This is like a microbenchmark which only measures the static overhead. Not indicative of a real app.
There's an entire cottage industry of "react" but smaller frameworks out there. Somehow, none of them have caught on.
Preact is the one I'd go for if I wanted a smaller react because it's quite mature and it provides the same API.