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Comment by tryptophan | Hacker News Reader

I hate javascript front-end stuff with a burning passion. I wanted to make a small widget, and somehow I needed 100+ libraries for this. The compilation/build/etc process makes no sense whatsoever, and I just type magic commands and hope it works.

I am seriously considering just using something like blazor or phoneix live view so I can ignore front end entirely.

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> somehow I needed 100+ libraries for this

This feels like an incredible security problem to me. When companies like 1Password switch to an Electron client, I'm left wondering how many dependencies they have. How do they protect against some minor library change introducing a security flaw?

Last year, I built a little widget thing in plain JS with Parcel[1]. It took away 100% of the tooling I used to spend a couple hours nailing down just to get started. When I need small JS projects that don't need a framework, etc, I'm likely to use Parcel in the future.

1. https://parceljs.org/

You didn't need 100+ libraries, or a compilation/build process. You just thought you did because that's what everyone else is doing. You could have used plain HTML, CSS and JS and probably have built it faster, and ended up with much leaner code.

Phoenix with Liveview is so good - not a solution to all the frontend problems but there's something about it that really feels magical.

I've recently also played around with adding AlpineJS to it and it solves some of the issues I was having with LV.

Only 100? Create-react-app said it pulled in something like 1600 last I saw (is that accurate? It must include duplicates, right?). It makes me nervous about security and stability when I see that

Why did you need any libraries? Why not just use vanilla JS?

You can use raw JS with rollup :)

Also blazor and phoenix will be more magical abstraction. Basically have to stand on the shoulders of giants these days.

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