Comment by apsurd

Comment by apsurd 8 hours ago

31 replies

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+1 React DX is really great. It started really great and it got weird and bloated but it's still really great relative to the JS landscape hell.

But, also yes, it's a pain in the ass and a frustrating kind of necessary evil. So there is room for improvements.

Nextjs is a living hell. The ironic thing is AI makes it dramatically more tolerable to the point it's actually pretty good. But that can't be a good thing in terms of architectural design can it? We're in odd times.

Of course, it's easy to be a hater on the sidelines. I am guilty. Nextjs likely just does too much in it's own made-from-scratch clever way. use-client vs server is just out-of-the gate ridiculous. But then I suppose the real question is "well if you want isomorphic environment, how else are you going to do it?". My answers is "I wouldn't!" but then vercel and the powers that be seem to have won the mindshare of the product crowd. At least for now.

Nathanba 2 hours ago

React DX is probably the worst DX of all frontend frameworks I've ever seen. All kinds of confusing concepts (hooks, memo, props passing, class style vs function style, an entire new "language" like JSX which you then first need to install an IDE extension for) and you cant even begin a react project most of the time without using some kind of react starter template because building this thing is so hugely complex that people just give up. Then you constantly run into issues of double rendering with reactjs which is quite hard to debug. I was hoping for something tiny like https://www.arrow-js.com/ taking off but the creator doesn't really work on it.

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thomaslord 7 hours ago

Honestly I think React DX kinda sucks, at least in some areas. Performance is one of the worst (`useMemo` and `componentShouldUpdate` are way to easy to ignore, constant re-renders are the norm and writing performant React code requires conscious effort to avoid footguns) but it's also just less self-explanatory than the alternatives I've tried.

I started doing web dev before reactivity frameworks were a thing, and I found Vue to be the most intuitive of the frameworks available when I first needed reactivity. To me, Vue feels like HTML with superpowers while React feels like a whole new way of thinking about webapps. I'm honestly a bit surprised that the article doesn't mention Vue, since Vue is (and has been for a while) the most popular "not React or Angular" framework option. Newer versions of Vue even support the "disappearing framework" feature Svelte was built for, which I'm excited to take advantage of when my biggest work project finally moves to Vue 3.

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  • apsurd 7 hours ago

    I think you've nailed it. It does come down to user preference.

    React _is_ a whole new way of thinking. Back in the days of jQuery it was very painful to stitch together web experience across HTML+CSS+JS. jquery provided much needed DX around utilities to navigate across these pieces. But it was still way too easy to treat HTML like your database and model user-state across a Frankenstein of server, json, html, and javascript.

    React was a paradigm shift. "Screw it, everything is javascript." The web depends on js runtime, we know we're going to need it. It starts to makes the best future-forward sense to use the only full programming runtime available. From DX pov this was spectacular to speed up prototyping. And you can finally truly model state purely from data.

    What followed was a huge a mess (redux), but I always say, what do we expect? The web is a mess, and it's great because it's useful. Humans are a mess!

    --- VUE: similar to angular I just don't align with "super-powered html attributes". It just doesn't make sense as a mental model. Because it's _not_ HTML spec and HTML is not a programming language. The more powerful the framework gets the more we reinvent a pseudo-programming language _through_ HTML. Angular was full-stop a no-go when I first saw it's for-loops in HTML.

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    • recursive 6 hours ago

      Neither react's JSX nor vue's template language are HTML. But rejecting vue's template on grounds that it's not HTML seems odd. React's JSX deviates from HTML in many ways. Like class vs className. XML self-closing vs HTML self-closing. onchange vs oninput. On purely aesthetic grounds, I can't understand how the react idiom of array.map() would ever be preferable to an affordance in the (non-HTML) template language for handling this normal standard thing that always happens.

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      • apsurd 5 hours ago

        it's not about feigning html purity it's the opposite. Why pretend we're using HTML when it's not? so with react it becomes a js flavor, jsx, which some people hate but it's very clear that it's a made up language IN real javascript.

        edit: the mental model is instant: it's just javascript for reals. do anything you want in javascript using real js primitives. it's not about looking pretty, jsx doesn't. it's about not relearning basic programming primitives in a made up _markup_ language.

        my issue with angular is it's neither real html nor any programming language. its made up pseudo-programming language for no other reason than it fools people into thinking "it's just HTML". that's my gripe.

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    • erikpukinskis 2 hours ago

      You are correct. JSX is not “just HTML”. It’s “just interleaved HTML and JavaScript”.

      `v-bind:id` and `@click.prevent` are something else. There is nothing like this in JSX. It’s not HTML. It’s not JavaScript. It’s some other language.

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jjordan 7 hours ago

I don't really recommend isomorphic environments, but if it's your cup of tea, Tanstack Start is making a lot of progress. It removes all of the magic and misdirection of Nextjs and just provides a good light alternative.

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  • rustystump 5 hours ago

    Issue with all things tanstack is they change everything constantly. The Tanner guy really does make decent libs but he drops em pretty quickly for others to take up maintenance on which makes it risky to pull into any production app.

    The best library are the complete ones.

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  • koakuma-chan 7 hours ago

    AFAIK "TanStack" doesn't support RSCs? That's a deal breaker for me. Also the guy named his framework after himself, it can't be good.

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    • staminade 7 hours ago

      Linus named Linux after himself, it can't be good!

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    • Swizec 5 hours ago

      For the record, the TanStack name comes from the community. Eventually Tanner stopped fighting back and made it official

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    • presentation 6 hours ago

      They built a half baked version of it and then haven’t finished it for a while but maybe they’ll get back to it sometime.

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  • throw-the-towel 6 hours ago

    Could you please elaborate on why you don't recommend isomorphic environments?

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827a 7 hours ago

Next initially jumped the shark when they went all-in on server-side rendering. The reason why Vercel did this is clear: client-side rendered apps can be hosted basically for free on Firebase, Cloudflare, or S3, so the only way they can raise their Vercel cloud revenue is by forcing their users into a dynamic-first world, pushing so much complexity and dynamism into the framework that only Vercel could disentangle how to host it effectively. The less-dystopic reasons they communicated as to why customers might want SSR; improved time-to-first-byte and a more PHP/Rails-like programming model; while well-intentioned, ultimately became of questionable value to customers given their choices during implementation.

I do actually believe a more PHP/Rails-like programming model would be beneficial for React; Vercel just missed the extremely important detail in how Rails is so dang productive. Its not their decisions when it comes to HTML templating; its Active Record.

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AlexErrant 7 hours ago

React DX is hot garbage. Words cannot express how much I LOATHE hook rules. Coming from a Solid JS background, where reactive primitives are just Javascript functions... I groan every single time I run into (yet another) hook rule.

I have to conditionally render empty fragments because React can't handle conditional hooks. It's the stupidest thing ever. "Oh hey let me allocate memory for this hook that will almost certainly never be used except under edge conditions! Sure, React can do conditional components, but conditional hooks are just too much for us!"

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  • nosefurhairdo 4 hours ago

    > I groan every single time I run into (yet another) hook rule.

    There are only two rules:

    1. Only call Hooks at the top level

    2. Only call Hooks from React functions

    Per https://react.dev/reference/rules/rules-of-hooks

    Not sure I understand the conditional beef, perhaps you can give example? I would assume if you want `if condition, useEffect(...)` you could simply replace with `useEffect(() => if condition...)`, no?

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    • AlexErrant 3 hours ago

      Fair. My bitching would've been better expressed as "I groan every single time I attempt to violate a hook rule." Which is a lot, because I'm new to React. It's almost certainly a "skill issue", but hooks are NOT just "JavaScript functions", contrary to React marketing PR.

      My conditional beef: in my app, users can choose between using the built-in mic for speech recognition or a 3rd party service (LiveKit). If the user chooses the built-in mic, I still must allocate memory for LiveKit's services because it's exposed as a hook, even if the user will never use it. This problem compounds - every option that I expose that uses a hook requires that I allocate memory for an option that may never be used. Also TTS - users can choose to use the phone's TTS, or a remote service, etc. Every option I offer, if the library exposes it as a hook (and they virtually always do), if I naively implement the feature, allocates memory for a hook that might never be used.

      Fuck. React. Hooks.

      My workaround is to conditionally render empty fragments. These fragments wrap hooks, which I then inject into the context. This makes it so I can conditionally run hooks. This is why I complained that React can handle conditional components, but not hooks. Concretely: https://pastebin.com/sjc3vXTd I'm using Zustand because god I need a lifecycle outside of React.

      Y'know how people complain about how Async "colors" functions? Hooks are also a type of function coloring. And they don't compose with Async.

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      • DangitBobby 2 hours ago

        Yeah, this is a really annoying thing about how hooks work. For whatever reason (I'm sure they have a great reason) React can't do hook state book-keeping correctly without tying it to a function component lifecycle.

        I think you actually can conditionally render a hook but that choice has to last for the entire rendered lifetime of the component. But that doesn't really help you when your user can switch between them.

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  • b_e_n_t_o_n 5 hours ago

    Hooks are also just JavaScript functions...?

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    • slmjkdbtl 4 hours ago

      Based on how they are run they are completely not just ordinary JavaScript functions, hook era components are also not just JavaScript functions, it's a very complicated system. React calling them "just functions" is untrue, just marketing buzz words, and it leads developers into traps.

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      • b_e_n_t_o_n 3 hours ago

        Many functions can only be called in a certain context. Calling them "not functions" is misleading imo because it implies those functions are compiled out or something, like `$state()` in Svelte.

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    • thomasfromcdnjs 4 hours ago

      They kind of are not though, you can't call them out of order and other things which is checked at runtime by the React "engine" and will stop script execution. If they were regular functions you could call them anytime.

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      • b_e_n_t_o_n 3 hours ago

        Many "regular" functions are context dependent.

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        • DangitBobby 2 hours ago

          They are context dependent, must execute in the same order every time, and must be called every time the component re-renders (i.e., they do not support conditional calls). They have enough gremlin rules that calling them "just functions" is unhelpful for reasoning about using them.

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  • dgfitz 7 hours ago

    I read things like this and think “I am so glad I don’t write JavaScript/ web-anything for a living”

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    • collingreen 7 hours ago

      cries in ts backend, react frontend, react-mobile client

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