Vue.js is just not as good as React | Hacker News Reader

Vue.js is just not as good as React

keyholesoftware.com

The title (as I type this) is heavily editorialized. The actual title is, “Deep Dive Into Vue.js”.

The description is: A common sense discussion of Vue.js as compared to React philosophies, feature parallels, and recommendations for when to choose Vue.js

@CharlesW I guess there's a reason why people short hand "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" to "the one about evolution" :) Sorta captures the essence without the bells and whistles.

Hey Zach, since you're new to HN my recommendation is to check out the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"…please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

As much as I detest Vue, I find it a better fit when you are onboarding new JavaScript developers.

React really requires a high degree of JS comfort, and experience with FP and immutable updates.

@throwaway26342 I agree, to an extent. A mid to senior level JS developer should be able to pick up React fairly quickly. A junior developer will struggle, no matter which framework/library is used.

Comparing Vue to React, the # of downloads React has is almost off the charts. Hard to justify using Vue in 2022, almost 2023. Very few use cases Vue is better at than React.

I wanted to like Vue because it has abstractions for many situations that turn up in web apps but I like the rendering model of React better because I can get it to draw anything, (e.g. 3js)

@PaulHoule, interesting, what other limitations on Vue did you run up against?

I haven't messed with it too much. I just did a toy project with it when I was first starting out with React and trying to understand alternatives.

My main problems with React have been: (1) I felt pretty comfortable with the object-oriented style of react components and really didn't feel the need for hooks, it's taken me a while to get on top of them because I need to maintain or use hook-based code, (2) A react app can drive you insane with a large number of widget sets that are all leaky abstractions. For instance you might hope that react bootstrap would let you forget about CSS and maybe it does for some projects but you might get into some situation where you have to understand CSS and understand the way bootstrap uses CSS and you might conclude you'd be better off writing your own CSS and (3) applications that call render() a tremendous number of times.

None of those things really turn me off to React but for an application I am developing on my own account (a workflow engine with machine learning training and inference features) I am writing a server-based web app not too different from the ones I wrote in 2001 with very little Javascript.

I find these easier to write than ever thanks to my own maturity and the maturity of the tools I use. With a localhost server it is fast as a desktop application. The #1 issue if I was using React is the extra hassle of a Javascript build system (pypi is bad enough!) and #2 is I could spend forever picking a widget set to use.

If I was interested in something like React I would seriously consider svelte as it has a different model that seems to perform a lot better, even if it doesn't have the huge ecosystem React has.

Agreed, for those of us on Windows, the assumption that Node/NPM folks make that we'll have Python installed on our machines by default is not very nice.

Hooks, I agree, those take a while to get used to. Once you do though, the code is so much cleaner than doing it based off of the lifecycle. And yeah, functional components make calling .render() unnecessary, the component _is_ the function.

React would be in contention if I too was working on a server-side rendered (Isomorphic) app. There would be others in the running too. Though for a purely user-browser driven UI, I still think React is far and away better than the alternatives, at least for right now.

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