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> [...] have you consciously considered, whether [it's] really worth the overhead?

Yes, I have. The overhead of a React/TS stack is considerably less than the overhead of having to hand-build all the stuff that Hyperapp's 12 kilobytes aren't enough to provide, or that using ClojureScript means very few other engineers will want to work with me to build because I'm doing everything in a language and stack they've never heard of.

> What's missing from hyperapp, which is only present in the 100MB+ deps?

Eleven years! Hyperapp is written in pure ES5, which was finalized in 2009, around the same time PHP 5.3 came out. The world has moved on a great deal since then. (But hey, I haven't had to think about hoisting for like six years now, so that was a fun blast from the past!)

That said, those 12 kilobytes of ES5 code are very concise, for sure. They also implement a virtual DOM and a sugar syntax over element creation and nothing else. To compare it based purely on codebase size, with a stack that provides orders of magnitude more functionality, seems at best very incompletely thought through, and at worst deliberately tendentious - although I'm sure that can't be the case.

There's a lot of misinformation floating around about the modern Javascript world. A lot of that dates from years back, like the left-pad problem, or that builds aren't reproducible - both of which were true at one time, but have long since ceased to be. Or that using these tools makes it impossible to deliver compact, performant code to the frontend - which, again, hasn't been true in quite a while. It's not false to say that webpage bloat is worse than it ever has been, but it is false to blame the tools for that problem.

Of course, I freely grant that it's hard to see these kinds of nuances if you don't have much or any context on what modern Javascript is actually like. What I don't grant is that that ignorance is any kind of worthwhile place from which to pass sweeping comments on the whole field of endeavor.



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