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Comment by pcr910303 | Hacker News Reader

> I spend most of my time at work in an Angular app and it sucks. The compile times suck, the developer experience sucks and it's not getting better, it's only getting worse.

> I wound up using ASP.NET Core Razor Pages (templated pages) and it's been a breath of fresh air - I haven't enjoyed myself this much writing web software in ages because I can get stuff done in very short order.

Okay, so I've never worked in Angular, so I can't really speak (maybe there are Angular killer features that justifies using Angular?), but... If it looks like it'll be simpler in ASP.NET pages, go for it!

Everybody likes lighter pages, if your app is simple * doesn't need to be a heavy Angular SPA, you shouldn't be using them.

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Most apps are simple, no I’m not talking about Facebook. The problem is templated pages apps are not considered sexy, so we build SPAs so we can look good (and pad the resume,) to the detriment of productivity.

At my day job, the meme that won and now dominate is "the percieved performance of a SPA is greater than that of a non-SPA". My calls for making our backend more performant are ignored (and probably ridiculed, because of how out-of-the-loop I seem). React for the win!

I hardly belong anywhere, it sometimes seems.

Personal anecdote: Angular 1.x at the time was a breath of fresh air because it allowed to create very clean, very modular front-ends with a lot of (unit) testing opportunities. The next best thing we had at the time (again, in my own experience) was Backbone, which was a lightweight layer on top of jquery but we didn't have any tests on that one.

So for us Java developers it was great. I don't know about Angular 2 and beyond, but I'm sure it has its place.

I get the impression that OP's day job requires that they use Angular but they were able to use ASP.NET Core Razor Pages for a side project. I could be wrong.

Either way, I can confirm to OP's findings with Angular. I worked on an Angular project not too long ago and every time I hit Command-S I had to wait 10 seconds before the page would refresh. Manually refreshing wasn't an option, of course, because it was busy compiling. I tried to explain to my client that those 10 seconds were quickly adding up considering what my billable rate was but they didn't seem to mind. It was from Google and that's all they needed to know.

React native’s fast refresh is... I’m not even sure of the words to describe it. Revelatory? I had no idea it was possible to develop apps so quickly and seamlessly while maintaining state as you code. I thought edit and continue debugging was the holy grail in C# until I used fast refresh and redux. I would not be exaggerating by saying that I would choose react native as a technology strictly because of how much fast refresh speeds up development of GUIs (but it’s great for many other reasons too). I can’t wait for fast refresh to make its way into react web. We have several large, complex apps in ionic/Cordova/angular stack and now that ionic react is stable it won’t be long for us to jump off Angular altogether.

We have a large desktop application that hosts tabs of other react applications and provides windowing features, all built in Electron, that is written in React. we can edit a component within an app and save it and have the UI update with the same state and the new component change in under a second. react native fast refresh is even better because it’s understanding of life cycles and hooks is better but hot reloading within a react app is extremely performant for us. I wonder why you’re having to wait so long?

I've started playing around with React Native lately and so far have been pleasantly surprised. I have also used NativeScript quite a bit and it too has a very fast compile and refresh. I don't know what it is about Angular that makes the refresh so slow.

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