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Comment by lohengramm | Hacker News Reader

I felt that way using React itself (for the web) - it was like writing code upon so many layers I didn't have control to fix eventual hairy bugs anymore. So I didn't even try Native.

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Were you using many other libraries? We try to keep React itself pretty simple and recommend you start with that.

I am probably blaming React for more than it's responsible for, but I feel that, in a real world project, it's rather difficult to not fall into that zone where you have webpack, several loaders and complex configurations for different environments, babel with plugins/presets, gulp, redux or something equivalent, strange directory structures because all libraries purposely try to avoid being associated with bad old big frameworks thus giving too much freedom for the programmer to be "creative" when organizing his code, node for SSR (and then taking care for everything to also work on the server), css modules, react wrappers crashing because wrapped libs were originally written with dom manipulation in mind etc. You know the list can go on, the last time I remember my package.json had around 50 direct dependencies, and it is possible to justify every one of them. All that to write magic JS code that imports assets, transforms them, output obscure css classes and a client.js file that eventually print some crazy warnings on line 53777 column 838383937.

I know I am just complaining like a grouchy old man and not really helping understand and solve the problem, but that's what I can do right now. I would say that maybe we are building too modular software and the complexity of glueing everything together is becoming a problem? I feel like the existance of several "react + this + that" boilerplates indicates something.

I can also be wrong and everything is OK and I am problematizing.

I purposely avoid all this mess. The only thing in my "build stack" was TypeScript and a small custom script I wrote myself to assemble things together.

Before I joined that project they were using yoeman and angular and a bunch of other useless crap. I got rid of all of it.

That's helpful, thanks.

Have you tried Create React App? We made it so that you don’t need to deal with any of that.

https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app

I don't remember struggling that much with React itself in terms of untraceable compilation problems.

But then again, I already have a lot of experience with normal web development, so I already know what's under the cover, more or less.

Whereas with mobile, I have none, and I felt that RN was supposed to let me do mobile dev despite not knowing what goes on under the covers.

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