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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

You don’t need dependencies like webpack, react, or even any javascript at all to show static pages… and it would be a poor use of them just to write static html. But if you want interactive elements like image editors, rich text edition, fancy tables, then you start needing smarter and smarter build tools to bundle it all together and support the maintenance of interactive complex web applications.

I'd also argue that having a static build tool that generates HTML will also allow you to write more HTML and more complex HTML, as you can abstract away reusable components. So there are benefits even if you are serving non-interactive HTML pages. Just cache the React build output.

why do i need React for any of this?

most template engines have partials and some have macros (Jinja2)

React-based static site generators are so slow that they’re unusable for any website that has more than a couple pages

I don't use React-based static site generators, but I'd imagine if they become slow it's because it's generating a large code-base, but unless you provide some benchmarks showing compilation of React vs some other templating system I can't really take your argument against it for this use case.

don’t take my word for it

https://css-tricks.com/comparing-static-site-generator-build...

Next.js and Gatsby are the slowest

Generating a bunch of HTML pages from markdown files doesn't seem like a remotely realistic test case for "interactive complex web applications".

The developer experience is better. I personally like type safe templates, and just the JSX bits of React are one of the most mature type safe templating frameworks with very good editor support.

You don’t. Then don’t use it. Nobody’s forcing you to use React.

Static site generators are alive and well: Hugo, Pelican, etc.

I've been brainwashed by consumers – they demand and expect a certain experience on the modern web. Also, you can run Next.js on a Raspberry Pi and free Cloudflare DNS+SSL. :shrug:

The fallacy of our generation. Except they literally don't. They just don't want their computer to not run out of battery loading your resume driven developed site.

I'd really like to know what kind of customer demands that a website should be 15 MB in size and use thousands of packages.

what are their demands?

pretty sure my Raspberry Pi will just give up after pulling 2000 npm packages and building native modules

You're wrong. I used to run node + mongo on my 3B+ until it died on me one last time :(

It could manage much, much more than that. Now, I haven't tried running Next on it but unless it's worse than Nuxt (which isn't all that fast, really), it should be fine.

These little SBCs are only lacking at GPU tasks

have you tried using a compiled language and a database that isn’t web-scale?

this should fix your dead board /s

No, I am not manly enough :(

Pretty sad about it dying on me, though. This time it wasn't just a borked flash card.

Been waiting for a 5 but it's taking ages

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