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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying you can do that with absolutely no build phase? For example, you can download vue.js and include it in your html page exactly like you could jquery.js back in the day and add a vue component to the page with no build step or toolchain or node.js or anything else involved at all. Is that what you are saying you can do with react?

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I think this is what you're asking for:

    <div id="root"></div>
    <script src="https://unpkg.com/react@16/umd/react.development.js"></script>
    <script src="https://unpkg.com/react-dom@16/umd/react-dom.development.js"></script>
    <script src="https://unpkg.com/babel-standalone@6.15.0/babel.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/babel">
      ReactDOM.render(
        <h1>Hello, world!</h1>,
        document.getElementById('root')
      );
    </script>

This is essentially what I meant. I think it's a great way to approach hacking on and learning React, Vue, or similar.

Sure you can. (Same with Mithril.) You can use either library with just a <script> tag and no build process. The notion that you can’t and you have to use JSX + webpack is kind of absurd. It feels like that false notion has been perpetuated and got people thinking they need to use another library if they want to keep things simple.

Actually now that browsers have fetch, async and await, you can do a lot with just those and document.createElement. No need for frameworks.

That being said...build toolchains are essential for complex apps.

They may be useful and/or convenient but no, they are by no means essential.

I justified that with the word complex. In my mind, a complex app is one that is built and maintained by a team over a long period of time. I don't know what you're doing to maintain complex apps between a dozen (or couple dozen) developers on with <script> includes, ES5, and pure CSS & JQuery...but I'd really like to hear it in a blog post of some kind. I've worked on large code bases with those tools and it was a nightmarish experience just to upgrade to the latest version of JQuery. If you're fine churning your wheels doing all that stuff manually rather than depending on NPM...sure I suppose you can get by and waste a lot of precious time in the process. If you care about user experience and developer experience, however, build tools are absolutely essential.

You're missing the point, the same was true of Dojo.

The point is not that scaled down is possible, it's that it's the way. It's not for the sake of learning, like the React with script tags tutorial. It's how people actually build things with jQuery; they just start hacking.

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