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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

You can use React like a library. You can even go without JSX, though nobody really does. React is also kind of odd because it includes a bunch of other stuff like hooks, even though most people bring their own state management to it. But it's definitely the least-framework-y of all the major frameworks.

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For years I used react without jsx - with a few minor conventions to make it shorter to write elements via JS (`_div(...)` being equivalent to the jsx `<div>{...}</div>`, and some minor variant for elems with attrs) it's quite easy to build trees using plain old JS syntax.

The advantages of doing that were better tooling support, since everything under the sun supported JS, but not necessarily JSX very well, and jsx isn't really all that important anyhow. Obviously that's not a factor anymore today ;-).

Yep! Really the non-JSX syntax is very close to that of most virtual DOM-based rendering libraries, including the fairly popular Mithril.js

React by itself is just a templating language, yeah I got it.

But i think for most devs out there, like 99% (yeah I made this up) of them, React is actually React + React-dom, the latter per the account of the official team is like a runtime thing, which perfectly fits into the description of a framework.

I understand where you're coming from - it is advertised as the 'view layer'. But I think that templates are more similar to the native browser language - html, so it is easier to grasp. It is also simpler and easier to implement than a js+jsx parser.

Nobody does react without jsx because it is the worst of both worlds, but if React had template strings (not necessarily built-in but at least as a first-party plugin) it would be a more viable option.

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