I still don't understand why someone would choose to essentially clone some code vs import a library. Suddenly you increase your maintenance burden, lose updates, etc. I've had no problems at all with UI libraries like Mantine. If you follow this logic, why not just clone all your npm repos and build from source. Ultimate control, right? Please help me understand the benefits here, because I tried out shadcn and wasn't into it
I don't think it's hard, it's harder than people think it's going to be. So they get frustrated and start abstracting away, ignoring history and hoping their fresh approach will finally make this thing easy.
We went out of business, but I made a web app for videographers to collaborate during production. Same things as frame.io. This was over 15 years ago. Frontend was pretty vanilla except relied heavily on jQuery. The main section of the app allowed you to commend on specific frames in a video. The code is split up amongst multiple files. Here is one: https://github.com/StevePotter/Takeoff/blob/main/Takeoff.Web...
Look at any of the sibling `app-productions-details*.js` files. Combined they formed a single interface. It was dicey. But damn the interface was snappy. I mean, instant. Code would have been much less these days but probably nowhere near as responsive.
Right. I encourage young devs to build a complex app using vanilla js. Feel the pain of two way state management. Then you’ll gain an appreciation for react. And you’ll learn browser APIs and know when react is overkill because it has its own pain
i’ve tried this, and it almost almost works to just rebuild the Dom on every state change as a pure function of state without any react or anything. The resulting interface is actually way snappier than react – but preserving local state of elements like what text is highlighted, where the cursor is, which radio button is tabbed to etc turns into a nightmare.
With all due respect, I don't believe it is "more snappier than react".
React itself with nothing else is plenty fast. You would have to go way out of your way to see performance differences between different UI approaches, computers are just way too fast to notice whether this click resulting in the div's text changing to +1 is slow or fast, even if the implementation were crazy convoluted.
What makes react apps slow is using it badly, and having 10 other libraries getting in the picture loading fat UI elements, etc.
And frankly these would be much slower in your render everything anew approach.
This is where "react is a library, not a framework" kinda lets it have its cake and eat it too. preact is 4 kb, React + react dom is like 30 kb, but when I use it under commercial pressure to deliver it seems to climb into the megabytes. I'm working on a react native app right now that is a completely embarrassing 150 Mb. The experiment in no react, build UI from scratch every state change has stayed around 65 kb without much attention paid to bundle size, with 10 kB of that being a bunch of linear algebra and differential equation solving code and 50 kb of that a plotting library that's completely nonblocking for the rest of the app.
Based on your description it sounds like you were halfway into reimplementing the virtual dom that react uses (or use to use? unsure if they moved away from that with the implementation of a compiler).
> But for several years we've been able to style radio buttons however we want using a few CSS tools
proves how good the current state is, where a dev can think things will just be ok, for everyone, if you just ripped all that complexity and ship it (which should be the attitude for a good framework).
It's not even the young devs. It looks like most of those complaining are back end developers who "rarely tinker with frontend" but think they can teach everyone else how to make it simple because "it should be static forms".
A great example of all-world-is-a-nail stance mixed with extreme hubris.
I did spend a serious amount of commercial time developing fronted UIs in React, Angular, and the before times in vanilla JS/css. I even wrote my own UI framework in Web Components, developed my own CSS framework used by an agency churning out projects for years. You get the idea, I did the thing, commercially, for over a decade. React and Angular are absolutely more complex in practice. That's fine, if you want the features go ham. But you don't need them, and most people mis-use the power and end up with a slow complex mess.
Perhaps those same people would have a slow complex mess in vanilla tools too though, so maybe React is a scapegoat like PHP was, and Javascript was.
I wrote the below to explain to our users what was happening, so apologies if the language is too simple for a HN reader.
- 0630, we switched our DNS to proxy through CF, starting the collection of data, and implemented basic bot protections
- Unfortunately whatever anti-bot magic they have isn't quite having the effect, even after two hours.
- 0830, I sign in and take a look at the analytics. It seems like <SITE NAME> is very popular in Vietnam, Brazil, and Indonesia.
- 0845, I make it so users from those countries have to pass a CF "challenge". This is similar to a CAPTCHA, but CF try to make it so there's no "choosing all the cars in an image" if they can help it.
- So far 0% of our Asian audience have passed a challenge.
Yup. AWS went down at a previous job and everyone basically took the day off and the company collectively chuckled. Cloudflare is interesting because most execs don’t know about it so I’d imagine they’d be less forgiving. “So what does cloudflare do for us exactly? Don’t we already have aws?”
This ad nonsense aside, don't buy Samsung refrigerators. They are so awfully made and difficult to service that almost no appliance repair companies will touch them. I got suckered into buying one a few years back and it was awful. The ice maker didn't work, every few weeks I would sop up a gallon of condensation at the bottom of the cheese drawer, and eventually it just died. I went to a local appliance store and they chuckled when I told them. They would never carry that brand. Just fridges, don't want to talk about other appliances.
This was downvoted? That’s sad. I tell folks getting started that they should build something without any framework so they can feel the pain that things like React are built to solve. Understanding the fundamentals is important so you can look at something like hooks as cognitive overhead that needs to be accepted
Ex employee here who built an aws service. Dynamo is basically mandated. You need like VP approval to use a relational database because of some scaling stuff they ran into historically. That sucks because we really needed a relational database and had to bend over backwards to use dynamo and all the nonsense associated with not having sql. It was super low traffic too
