Comment by lewisl9029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lewisl9029 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Thank you for the kind words!

To answer your question, the system is definitely not as flexible as I'd like it to be today. The eventual goal is for Reflame to support many of the most popular development toolchains out of the box, enough to make it possible to run alongside them in the same codebase, across many frameworks.

But we have to start somewhere, and create-react-app is where we've focused our attention so far. I want to work on supporting Vite-based React apps next, and where we go from there is pretty much entirely up to community demand.

There's also no technical limitation stopping Reflame from supporting frameworks outside of React. In fact, I'm pretty sure if you stuck with production mode live previews that do full browser refreshes on every change, you could just swap out the React initialization code in the entry point with a Vue/Solid/Angular version and it should work just fine (hit me up if you end up trying this and running into blockers, happy to look into what it'd take to unblock this use case). However, there's just a ton of work that needs to go into building a first-class HMR-style, state-preserving workflow for each framework, and until then I wouldn't be comfortable with advertising first-class support for them.

Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever be able to support a fully custom webpack config that's not based on a popular preset like create-react-app. The surface area to cover is just too gigantic there.

I think this is really your big downside. You're inadvertently competing with Vite and Webpack right now. I don't know if there's a good way around that, though, seeing as your magic is that you've written a faster bundler.

I hate to be the Hacker News commenter who is like "are you going to open source it?" But I am curious, do you think you think you could release your toolchain in a way that people can run it locally and get the same benefits that you're advertising?

(I say this as someone who currently uses esbuild and Preact. Your service looks really cool, but you would have to convert me to react-create-app if that's all you support.)

So supporting Vite-based React apps is _very_ high on my list of priorities at the moment, precisely because I don't really want to be pushing people to create-react-app just to use Reflame, since it offers a strictly inferior experience compared to Vite today. :)

I ended up having to start with create-react-app support, mostly because that's what one of my ideal early customers was using, and I wanted to make it as easy as possible for them to make the switch.

So hopefully once Vite support is ready, that could unblock your use case? (though I guess you'd also need to be willing to switch to React from Preact, which I realize is not a small ask)

Re: open source. I do actually intend to open source pieces of it. The VSCode extension is an especially great candidate since it's relatively well contained and doesn't require any specific infra to run.

Open sourcing the backend pieces probably won't happen anytime soon though, because it is very tightly coupled to very specific infrastructure (fly.io, NGS, FaunaDB, Dynamo, just to name a few), and there's a ton of moving pieces that all need to be configured to precisely to work together in order for even basic functionality to work as expected (especially in a geo-agnostic setup, like the one I'm current operating).

The support overhead for a self-deployed setup would be absolutely massive, and I'd have to think really hard about taking it on even for a lucrative contract for a large enterprise client (and the answer in the end would probably still be no). There's no way I can possibly offer that for free while making any progress on improving the service.

Thanks, I didn't know how integrated your backend was. Good luck

Reply on news.ycombinator.com