Is Turbopack really 10x faster than Vite?
github.com
github.com
How do people take anything from them serious when their job description is literally taking money in order to influence people...
I guess that's just our society. We love to be told what we should feel/do/care about on a societal level, so people gobble it up even if the content is obviously just paid marketing
Let's be clear here: being an influencer literally means you're voluntarily accepting money for lying to people, at scale. You enrich yourself by harming others. You're actively proving you're corrupted and cannot be trusted.
How people making this choice are not shunned by society is beyond me.
But if there are some influencers that make it very clear on all social media that it's a "paid placement", that they are getting paid to shill for the thing -- then I would definitely have a lot more respect for those folks. I'm not sure this is possible though? it would definitely make your "job" a lot harder, and that is telling.
But I don't necessarily want to demonize influencers; I more feel sorry for them, most of whom are hustling without making a ton of money. But the whole thing seems very sordid to me.
The simple solution is to only agree to represent products you actually like. For influencers who are popular enough that they can pick and choose, this isn't all that hard.
The thorny issue is the smaller influencers (who are the majority, for sure) who have to take whatever is offered to pay their bills.
Sure, but there's no way for me as a viewer to tell whether a given influencer is making honest choices, or just peddling whatever shit pays them the most. In fact, the whole value of influencers to the marketers is that they confuse people on this very issue, that they convince people they're being honest even though they're not.
> The thorny issue is the smaller influencers (who are the majority, for sure) who have to take whatever is offered to pay their bills.
Right. And since the popular influencers started as such smaller ones and most likely had to compromise their ethics right at the start, why should I believe they suddenly found their moral compass again once they became popular?
I think it's crazy that it has become routine to shill for things without clearly disclosing that you are getting paid to do so, in ways that violate FTC regulations which pre-social-media would have been actually enforced.
The FTC says:
> If you endorse a product through social media, your endorsement message should make it obvious when you have a relationship (“material connection”) with the brand. A “material connection” to the brand includes a personal, family, or employment relationship or a financial relationship – such as the brand paying you or giving you free or discounted products or services.
— https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-...
We all know that is in fact simply not done. (Sure, the clever among us know that anyone that seems to be an "influencer" is getting paid for endorsements; but it is not generally actually disclosed, we just have to assume, and if you see an individual video who's to say if it's an ordinary consumer sharing a review as a one-off, unless you are cynical or knowledgeable enough to know that doesn't really even exist anymore, everyone is on the take).
The FTC again:
> If a brand gives you free or discounted products or other perks and then you mention one of its products, make a disclosure even if you weren’t asked to mention that product.
Yeah, right. It is to laugh.
I am just discussing the ethics of "influencers" generally rather than trying to win a debate necessarily, but I think the picture the original commenter paints is largely accurate, and you are maybe quibbling over semantics of "lying" vs "misleading" that don't seem to be fundamental to the question to me.
But yeah, we have not much more to say on it I think.
Yes. Being deliberate is what makes influencers liars, and not just misguided performers.
The aim of influencer marketing is to leverage parasocial relationships to sell stuff, and it works because people think of influencers more like 'a somewhat distant friend' than a talking head or a traditional paid promoter.
I'm more comfortable with "Coca-cola pays me money to make ads on behalf of Coca-cola" compared to "literally any company pays me to pretend I'm just a regular person who discovered this cool new product and it's so life-changing that I have to tell my loyal followers"
And it's worth highlighting what parasocial marketing means: it means exploiting natural desire of people to form bonds, in order to peddle wares. It's another kind of abusing people for profit.
And yes, technically marketing on the other edge of known/parasocial spectrum isn't new either - it's occupied by people joining MLMs, who are duped into burning friendships and family ties in order to make money in a totally-not-pyramid scheme. The new thing is all the points between celebrities and MLM zombies being occupied by different kinds of influencers.
----
I get why that sounds bad, but is it always bad? Is there something inherently bad about the movie podcasts I’ve listened to for 10 years having brief Squarespace sponsor breaks?
Does the badness go away when I subscribe on Patreon and get ad-free episodes? I mean either way they are “exploiting my natural desire to form bonds and using that for financial benefit.” And yet, it doesn’t feel that bad to me. It feels like I’m just paying for original creative content, even though it’s true that a big part of why I like the content is the parasocial relationship I have with the hosts.
It's like, remember when everyone and their dog started peddling shady VPNs on YouTube? Or how they're all peddling NFTs now? You and me understand what those products are, and we can just roll our eyes and continue to consume content. But others in the audience? Suffice to say, I now regularly have to dissuade my family members and people in their circles from buying into bullshit that's eagerly promoted by their favorite YouTube stars.
I don’t see how advertisements aren’t lying and manipulation at scale in a meaningfuly different capacity
Also, there are degrees to everything. I'm picking on influencing here because it's extremely direct and blatant form of manipulation. If that isn't rejected by society at large, then there's no hope for it dealing with more traditional forms of manipulation.
----
[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
Couldn't influencers be considered a more positive form of advertising in that they are open about what they are? I've always had more trouble with insidious types of advertisements or ones where the relationship between someone reviewing an item and the vendor isn't disclosed. When I know someone is an influence/tech evangelist/promoter/some other term, I at least can have my mental guard up, which is not something I can keep up 24/7
I won't, but I appreciate the clarification nonetheless. I'm also trying to be non-confrontational, and while my opinion on ads is rather firm, it's still subject to change as I understand the world and the human condition more.
> Couldn't influencers be considered a more positive form of advertising in that they are open about what they are? (...) When I know someone is an influence/tech evangelist/promoter/some other term, I at least can have my mental guard up (...)
So, we have to distinguish between the two kinds of influencers here. Brand ambassadors, tech evangelists and the like are at least somewhat open about this (though elsewhere in the thread I've seen examples of ones that are purposefully unclear). It still feels icky to me, but I understand the game. Though again, many don't - I've seen plenty of people buy into what tech evangelists say uncritically, in part because their enthusiasm is an effective manipulation tactic, acting on an emotional level to get around peoples' defenses.
And then there are the other kind of influencers - the ones I believe are the majority on social media. The ones running random streams and channels, some sneaking in paid product placement covertly, some doing sponsorship section overtly - in both cases, the reason they're being paid is because of (for a lack of better term) trust transfer. You like the podcasts some influencer makes, so you mistakenly assume their recent interest in cosmetics is genuine. You like the high-quality science videos a YouTuber creates, so you assume they know what they're talking about when they pitch you a VPN service in the sponsorship section - even though, in truth, they have no first clue about it, and are setting you up for a bad deal. Either way, they don't care - you're not their peer, you're not their friend. You're the resource they're exploiting.
What irks me the most is when I see people intentionally seeking out career as this latter kind of influencer. They're already convinced that a degree of dishonesty is totally legitimate way of making money. I call it dishonesty, because I doubt they'd pitch the same cosmetics or NFTs to their mother or their close friends, in the same way they do to their audience on their channel.
I mean, that's literally just a descirption of marketing, right? Or Public Relations. Taking money to influence people? It's a whole industry.
What an influencer brings to it is that they use one person's own personal likeness as a 'brand'... and try not to disclose the extent to which they are getting paid for marketing and/or PR. Which yeah, takes an already suspicious industry and makes it both more so and more... pathetic, if that's the right word. Most attempted "influencers" are struggling/hustling without making a ton of money, but even those who are successful seem just in a sad place to me.
What's happening here is someone is getting famous outside of the traditional avenues of entertainment (radio, tv, sports, movies) through social media and getting the same sponsorship deals. They've just been given a bad name to lump them all together. I'm not a fan of the label "influencer" but I think it's nonsense to see them as a sign of societal decay. Societal change maybe, but its not dire IMO.
I think it actually is useful to have a generic term for this as well across that multi-century spectrum of too specifically named and niched sub-jobs. It makes a useful lens to even better describe our own history. ("What's a cigarette girl? Well in the height of Big Tobacco the Tobacco companies would pay ladies, generally pretty ones, to be influencers selling cigarettes at other businesses such as a bars. Many of these influencers were not employees of the bars, they were more directly contractors for the Tobacco companies.")
I even think that the generic sense of revulsion many have to the specific word "influencer" is actually a useful part of that, too. These jobs were never pretty. Many were designed to be in the background marketing things to people like bad magic tricks designed to misdirect slight bits of money. Influencers are not necessarily a bad thing, and those are sometimes useful jobs in their own little ways, but having the generic term itself be a little revulsive is maybe a great reminder that they aren't always our (parasocial) friends, either, and are still trying to sell us stuff at the end of the day.
(A lot of people assumed cigarette girls worked for the bars or restaurants they found them in, when really that was a direct marketing arm of the cigarette companies. Alcohol companies to this day also hire a lot of "brand ambassadors" the now gender neutral, PC term that they prefer over "influencer", though "bar girls" was also a name for that not even that many decades back, and these influencers do the exact same thing: there are people in bars selling you alcohol, with the permission of the bar owners, of course, but employed by the marketing arms of the alcohol companies. Because they aren't bar employees they are legally "allowed" to often "get more personal" and sometimes don't even pretend to be "on the clock" working. Even more fun, some of these "brand ambassadors" for alchohol are only barely paid in like product because these "brand ambassadors" are doing it "on their own" "for fun" like a rewards program and multi-level marketing had a baby that decided selling alcohol to already drunk people was a perfect business model, which is also a fun way to skirt labor laws if you can get it and maybe not obvious with a title like "brand ambassador" but a bit easier to suspect if you call it "influencer".)
When someone posting videos of themselves testing lipstick or 10 dollar dresses makes more money than dozens highly trained real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society and the world as a whole, it does in fact explain, to some extent, why we have a child book author running the entirety of hard work of generations of people that built the German industry into the ground.
> When someone posting videos of themselves testing lipstick or 10 dollar dresses makes more money than dozens highly trained real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society and the world as a whole
Some people who do that almost every single day for years eventually work up to that. For every one person who reaches that mark as an influencer there are 1000 more who do that work and make... zilch. It's like winning the lottery with a little bit of agency sprinkled in.
Equity is a thing, but I don't know many engineers working for zero dollars on the hope that one day maybe they'll get lucky and become one of the minority of engineers who make any money...
-
Also:
> why we have a child book author running the entirety of hard work of generations of people that built the German industry into the ground.
huh?
("Engineers"... when software engineers largely working on advertising and smoothing commerce to sell people garbage they don't need make more money than most "real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society"... yeah, it's not just about the influencers, we can look in the mirror, the majority (although not all) of software engineers making mid-six-figures are probably working on selling people crap one way or another, not making anything necessary for the "betterment of society")
But yeah, the vast majority of "influencers" are hustling and struggling and dreaming of being the very succesful 1% while in fact barely making enough to get by. Which seems to me important to talk about when we start talking about "influencers" as as a class or career. There are a tiny portion of "influencers" who get mega-wealthy, we hear about them because they are click bait for media coverage of course (very meta).
In general, becoming a software engineer through a boot camp would be a lot more reliable way to make $100-$200K than being an "influencer" -- you don't even need to be a very good coder to break $100K, which most influencers (let alone aspiring influencers) don't break.
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/feb/24/hustle-and-h...
https://nealschaffer.com/how-much-do-instagram-influencers-m...
Now, you can claim the judgement of the market should replace people's sense of fairness. In that case, there's no problem. Or, you can see the market being misaligned with our sense of fairness as a bug, and ask how it can be fixed.
> Or, instead, you can ask how can the market be coerced to be more fair.
I explicitly don't see the market being misaligned with our sense of fairness as a bug, because I am not one to judge what people like, as I mentioned. For the one making lipstick videos, I will not tell them that their work is less valuable than engineers', because, as I mentioned, it is not for me to decide. If their viewers like it, then that's good for them.
>> Or, instead, you can ask how can the market be coerced to be more fair.
I edited it to make it closer to what I meant. "Coercing the market" feels too much like giving people green light to force their opinions on others, which is already a big problem in modern society, and I'm not advocating more of it.
What I'm after here is what I believe is a human universal, even if fuzzy in details: the hierarchy of value based on how much one's contributing to others' well-being. It's the one that would place farmers, doctors, garbage collectors and sanitation engineers near the top, and influencers near the bottom.
The way the market allocates rewards doesn't reflect the social or personal importance in any way - it reflects the ability of a person to capture rewards. Farmers, rescue workers, cleaners, etc. get little, because their work has been optimized to extreme degree. They are worse off because of scaling. Successful[0] entertainers and influencers get a lot, because they benefit from scaling - near-zero marginal cost of any additional member of the audience means that, even thought they provide small amount of value to each person and receive small reward, it adds up to a lot of money.
This mechanism, few people serving a tiny value multiplied by large audience, is just one of the "money printers". There are others, like controlling the way money flows (advertisers), or skimming off the high volume of money flow (finance), etc. Point being, all those mechanisms feel like they're exploiting the structure of the market, instead of being a useful service to others.
----
[0] - Almost forgot about this, but it's probably the critical thing: these jobs are in a winner-takes-all market.
If all the makers disappeared overnight, shit would get crazy in a hurry. Faster even for things like plumbers/electricians/etc, who get paid less than engineers ironically.
Tell me again about the value that influencers create.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btqdaqEHw0A [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33334091
JS Framework that doesn’t support serverless (aside from the sponsoring company‘s walled garden) - won’t fly with me in charge for infra.
I'm very happy with https://github.com/brillout/vite-plugin-ssr
No clue who signed off on this marketing but they just outed themselves as untrustworthy to a whole segment now. What a stupid move...
Deno vs bun was same case, each showed their runtime as faster
- Bun does recognize they don't have multi-processor yet, so yeah cannot compare that (remember it's still alpha software!). So they compared what they had so far with a similar setup in Deno, pretty fair for that stage IMHO!
- In real-life you'd have either 1 thread for smaller apps, or setup a proxy with multiple instances if the program was single-threaded, so the comparison Deno made was in no way realistic.
"My database A is is faster than B! (When B is not using indexes, because my database A does not have indexes, so it would be unfair to let B uses indexes..." is the equivalent here.
"I'm building a new product. It's half-way there, but so far I've finished single-threaded processing! Look, at single-thread it's faster than anything else by a large margin".
That's it. Indexes in a DB are like the main thing to do, while many/most servers that are run online are still single-threaded, so not a good comparison.
Not having to do that is quite an advantage for Deno though regardless of the perf claims.
What if some next big change doesn't align with the best interest of the community?
You can see some future parallel to Microsoft and the `dotnet watch` debacle[0] where the dotnet team introduced a feature to allow hot reload then some executive neutered it except for Visual Studio because "it wasn't stable yet".
No one will know the true reasons why it was pulled (and then re-released after community outcry), but it left a sour taste in the community. And in the case of Microsoft, I think they have even smaller incentives to pull this kind of stuff (VS is a very tiny, tiny portion of their revenue compared to Azure and Office) whereas Vercel is much more tightly bound to Next.js so it seems inevitable that there will be a point in time when Vercel's interests comes to loggerheads with the community's best interest.
It may seem far-fetched right now, but all you need to do is look at the HTML source for Target.com and Walmart.com and see how a corporation has created tremendous leverage under the guise of OSS. The obvious outcome is to use that leverage at some point in the future to extract capital. The fact that they built something novel instead of embracing an already really good community solution (Vite) smacks of creating leverage in the same way that Apple has been empowered by their walled garden platform ownership.
I trust Evan You far, far more than I do Vercel to make decisions in the interest of the community.
[0] https://dotnetcoretutorials.com/2021/10/23/the-hot-reload-de...
If one build is .75 of a second and the other build is 1.5 seconds I probably wouldn't consider the .75 of a second a significant improvement because I would probably not gain anything from the slight improvement.
I'm sure you can construct lots of other examples whereby one my prefer a less faster build over a faster build or just feel that it was not actually important either way.
NextJS is an open-source framework under the MIT license, so if Vercel ever did anything to compromise NextJS, it could just be forked, but to my knowledge and experience with NextJS, they've provided and continue to provide an awesome framework/ecosystem around React.
Aside performance, this has consequences because of their stale-while-revalidate technique for static pages in incremental regeneration. If cache becomes obsolete on 1 instance and it's revalidate on the next request, it's not revalidated on other instances, so users accessing them are going to see stale data until that instance itself does revalidation. Having even a percentage of pages showing stale data can be painful for certain scenarios.
NextJS users been asking for more flexiable caching for some time.
I think it's a pretty good example.
As for forking it, how many companies have enough resources and are willing to go that distance?
As for the forking it comment, that's exactly the point. Vercel is investing heavily into NextJS, spending millions of dollars on hiring full time developers to work solely on it, and they give NextJS away for free. So having the best Next experience on the platform that they own and control and can fine tune makes sense to me. Nobody is forcing you to use NextJS or any other library.
Like most of the nextjs 13 changes seem like a lot of extra work for not much benefit.
From the article, the 10x improvement was more 6x and required 30k modules... Turbopack's 15ms was rounded down to 0.01s while Vite's 87ms was rounded up to 0.09s. isn't Android build level slow.
Aside, this kind of "good enough" attitude is what brought us the JS bundle behemoths, and abstractions on top of abstractions. Even if the difference is small, it adds up if everyone thinks that the performance of their one little library is just "good enough."
"pages" is such an obvious name indicating webpages go here. The new "app" directory is super ambiguous, might as well have named it the "code" folder...
Honest question - can anyone ELI5 why I should avoid them? The only concrete things I have seen are "they're exaggerating the 10x figure", and "they collect metrics and it's hard to turn it off". Both aren't great, but seems an overreach at first glance to avoid them for those reasons.
Vercel simply has a lot of VC funding and is using marketing to sell their tooling and their platform. It's not unique to them, nor is it particularly egregious especially when Evan You himself clearly admits Turbopack is, in fact, slightly more performant than Vite. They lied about some benchmarks. Very dumb of them. I will move on and will not really avoid Vercel unless I have much more immediate concerns like their pricing or other ethics concerns that have more drastic effects
From the submission:
"There were number rounding issues in the original numbers for the 1k component case - Turbopack's 15ms was rounded down to 0.01s while Vite's 87ms was rounded up to 0.09s. This further got marketed as a 10x advantage when the original numbers were close to 6x."
That is more than exaggeration, it's either incompetence or deceitful. They also did not even release a benchmark at first, and if you read Evan's writeup it could be argued the benchmark is not a fair comparison.
They made a lot of noise about Next.js 13 when a lot of the new features are turbobroken. Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/yj4r3q/migration_fr...
They are claiming turbopack is a webpack successor purely based off of having hired the creator of webpack: https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1584996270242148352.
They are pushing the idea that they are doing revolutionary stuff when in actual fact they are copying existing projects that have been around for years:
- turbopack using the same architecture as Parcel: https://twitter.com/devongovett/status/1585035737971724288
- "literally copy pasted Lage’s design and docs and branded it as Turborepo" https://twitter.com/jeffbcross/status/1583251710654283776
I strongly dislike the way they have gone about marketing their new tech.
Things like this also feel off: https://twitter.com/ascorbic/status/1585004156615479296
Everyone is jumping on it, and accountability is good, but no reason to avoid Vercel.
“Successors of webpack” is just more marketing as webpack isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Turbopack is just another packer among a sea of them.
Parent talks purely about software while you're talking about the author of the software.
Hard disagree about the marketing part as well. For something to classify as a successor to something else, it should at least provide feature parity for the core features of that something else (in this case extensibility).
That definition of "successor" would make 99% of all things people usually call successors ineligible to be called as such.
> And it's objectively faster than Vite, not that I care
From this submission:
"Since this is a composite benchmark that involves both Node.js and native Rust parts, there will be non-trivial variance on different hardware. The numbers I posted were gathered on my M1 MacBook Pro. Other users have run the same benchmark on different hardware and reported different results. In some cases Vite is faster in the root case, whereas in others Vite is significantly faster in both cases."
Right now, Vercel is making much ado about nothing.
What do you mean "still"? Everyone setting up Vite is supposed to NOT use the default configuration?
> After reading the post and benchmark code, here are a few key takeaways: 1. The Vite implementation is still using the default, Babel-based React plugin.
I.e. the "still", refers to the config used in Vercel's original benchmark. Since they had tweaked the Turbopack React config, yes, this is noteworthy. Whether this was ignorance about Vite (i.e. making a straw-man argument) or malice, we don't know. Since Vercel did publish their config, assuming ignorance is enough for me. My own conclusion was that defaults are tradeoffs, and that tweaking them can improve some aspect (performance) while negatively affecting another (disk space):
>> The reason Vite currently defaults to Babel was a trade-off between install size and practicality. SWC's install size is quite heavy (58MB in node_modules whereas Vite itself is only 19MB), and many users still relied on Babel for other transforms, so a Babel pass was somewhat inevitable for them. However, that may change in the future.
Did they? My understanding is, that Turbopack uses SWC by default. So without at least a confirmed intent to change the default on Vite’s part, I feel like that choice is valid (though it should be explicitly mentioned).
Evan's criticism is that By default, Next use RSC(React server components) which is slower for HMR. in the benchmark, they disabled it for getting higher performance. At the same time, they are saying vite should use default setup for "fairness"
So I guess it’s bad that instead of radically different configs and performance of Webpack vs Rollup vs Parcel vs etc, compared to the future of choosing between a much more mature build tool market with Vite and Turbopack is a bad thing?
Mere fact that we're at the point where we have transpiler upon transpiler upon transpiler, where "wRiTtEn iN rUsT" is used as quality/performance control, where people throw term performance around as if it's a hot potato and no one mentions environments/hardware and actual real world use scenarios and where apparently everyone are building World of Warcraft scale apps in frontend is what's making a mockery out of entire frontend world. It's no wonder that entry is difficult and that so many impostors are trying to build a name for themselves by producing yet another useless library that's gazillion times faster than the other useless library.
Frontend is a joke because of self-proclaimed developers building tools which they themselves can't use or explain to wide audience and that causes negative feeling when one has to deal with frontend manure.
I wish you well in your new career as a professional sculptor but "the js ecosystem has too many options!" gets posted on every one of these threads with little specific relevance to the article at hand.
I've been searching for a "full-stack" Web development job for the past 8 months this year, and aside from industry incompatibilities, the biggest headwind I'm facing finding an employer that recognizes front-end development is so much bigger than how you arrange your JavaScript to enable interactivity.
I have experience with React; my last career position allowed me to go from 0-100% confidence/competence with Svelte in 4 months. But employers want to see some equivalent of "3-5 years experience with React" and structure their shitty technical assessments similarly, and I've really had a problem trying to find the right way to show I'm just as qualified.
Runtimes: a lot of frontend JS engineers don't know what these are. Being able to explain them (and the difference between Node and Deno for ex) is a good answer. For backend jobs this is a hard requirement, but when I see "Node" in a frontend job listing I assume it means "can install packages from Node."
Frameworks: (like Next) it depends. If I'm hiring for an app already built in one, maybe. A general answer like "SSR is a problem with React" and "this framework solves that problem this way" is useful.
Do any developers actually care/notice this level of HMR delta anyway, whether it's 80ms or 72ms? Is it really important for a HMR to be 80ms faster?
If you don't like the unit "completions per hour", consider that you don't have to drive for an hour or even go a mile to go 60 miles per hour.
In a car, 60mph has some kind of well-known interpretation; there's an experience to that that people can at least vaguely identify. And it's also related to fairly intrinsic limits, such as legal speed limits, safety, etc.
But even in a car, people tend to care about trip-times, not speeds. And speeds are harder to work with; If you travel 30mph on your commute to work due to traffic; and 60mph on your way home - what was your average speed? Not 45.
Outside of a car and in a computation context, it's even more impractical to talk about "speed" - after all, we're usually dealing with lots of stages; and it's rather easier to simply add up latencies than it is to some reciprocal of reciprocals dance. Even if time is workload dependent, then the time-per-workload framing tends to be more helpful than the workload-per-time framing.
As a corollary, people currently talk about high refresh gaming, and will happily report how some workload went from 300fps to 400fps, without noting that this is the same frametime reduction as going from 48 to 50fps (setting aside perceptual limitations). Workload-per-time is pretty unintuitive.
I hate it a little less now :)
Hence, "it's 10x faster" is a valid way to write "it does the same work in 1/10 the time".
I still think "X times less than" can GTFO though - as in 10,000 is "seven times less than" 70,000 - which is the kind of thing I'm seeing more recently. That wasn't mentioned in the article though, it was maybe a bit unfair to lump them together.
Seconds of developer time could be saved every day!
To make matters worse, now the react and next teams are actively colluding with each other, effectively allowing vercel to have a competitive advantage on feature development for react.
It might seem great now but this is the hairline crack that will destroy the react ecosystem.
I wouldn’t be surprised if vercel tries to buy react and its team.
I’ve understood this and stopped using Next with all the enabled by default and intentionally difficult to disable metrics collection system they have in Next.
Having it enabled by default, without asking is already evil enough.
Refusing to have a setting you can easily commit into the repository to turn it off is next level.
They trick people with the “just set this env var” to turn it off, and rely on people doing it wrong, forgetting to do it in certain environments, etc. it’s intentionally complicated, when a frigging Boolean setting in next.config.is would be better. They refuse to do it. That’s what evil companies do.
I just tried it myself on a brand new Next project:
$ npx create-next-app@latest
...
$ npx next telemetry disable
Next.js' telemetry collection is already disabled.
Status: Disabled
You have opted-out of Next.js' anonymous telemetry program.
No data will be collected from your machine.
Learn more: https://nextjs.org/telemetry
An issue was crated about it but they just closed without responding: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/31360
1. Last paragraph of that link you posted
2. https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/8851
3.https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/10713
4. Many similar discussions to this one here on hackernews.
``` NEXT_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 ```
in your .env file. I mean it couldn't be any easier.
> They trick people with the “just set this env var” to turn it off, and rely on people doing it wrong, forgetting to do it in certain environments, etc. it’s intentionally complicated, when a frigging Boolean setting in next.config.is would be better. They refuse to do it. That’s what evil companies do.
This is exactly the evil part I'm talking about.
There's an easy way to do this, which is having a config setting. They don't want to put it easy, and provide all these more convoluted ways, because what you describe is an "ideal" which doesn't reflect real life at most workplaces. That's the whole trick. "It's easy, just put this environment variable and ensure everyone on your team does it on their laptops and ensure every staging and production environment also does it and setup checks and scripts to automate it and alarms and improve your processes... it's just that easy".
Can you explain what's wrong with having a friggin boolean in a config file? Like VSCode does? Like any other non-evil piece of software does?
That's what I mean with being evil. That's what I mean with tricks.
Of course it can be disabled, and it "seems easy". That's the trick.
I'd say: everyone thinks they know javascript. Learning a new language is easy (especially with C-like syntax) but not the library. The language having nearly zero standard library makes it change under your feet on every different context. Deno started the initiative to supply what you get in the browser everywhere, but the browser being a GUI environment, the missing stuff need to come from somewhere, like the Deno.listen[0]. .NET is not much better with one million different runtimes with different platform support and capabilities.
Now, if I do need a lot of interactivity in the frontend, I use Inertia with Laravel, which gives me a real full stack, robust, battle tested, well integrated and very productive solution.
I do - .NET (since 5) has been great. And you've got stuff like Blazor for the frontend if you want to avoid JS entirely.
It would be wise to decouple Vercel, the company, and Next, but Next as a framework itself is great to work with at scale.
However, this is the foot in the door that creates incentives that prioritizes their business model over creating a vibrant and healthy ecosystem.
Now that the react dev team and next dev team are closely working together, to the point that the react team is part of the nextjs conf announcements, it really starts to show the wolf in sheep's clothing.
This is not an open ecosystem anymore, it's being run by FB and VC money.
Both target.com and walmart.com are running Next.js (view source → `__NEXT_DATA__`).
The disingenuous comparisons against Vite's performance seem innocent enough, but there's an underlying cynicism I cannot shake that the true objective is to own the ecosystem so they can create leverage against the community of users -- both commercial and non-commercial -- in the future.
I think I would personally feel very differently had they announced that they are investing in Vite, for example.
Meta would have nothing to gain and everything to lose from that, highly unlikely they would be interested.
why buy it when you can just wait for people quit and come over :)