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Comment by aosaigh | Hacker News Reader

I really want to like Next.js but as a recent adopter (within the last year) I’m not sure I’m going to stick with it.

I find the “new” way to write Next apps incredibly confusing. Everything is now a mix of server and client and there’s so much rendering complexity. Im sure for big ambitious companies this focus on performance is great, but I find that it greatly compromises developer experience.

I’ve also found the piecemeal transition to the new app router pretty challenging as I’ve had to feel around to find the issues (of which there have been a few)

That said, Vercel makes deployment so easy so I’ll probably stick around a while longer to see if things get ironed out.

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I fear next.js has been infected, like many other incredibly successful projects, by the ever expanding feature-set to match the ever expanding popularity.

We have seen it all before and will continue to see it again.

> Any successful project will start by doing one thing, well, but end up doing many things, poorly.

https://bower.sh/bowers-law

They went on a hiring spree the last two years, trying to position themselves as the React framework, or rather, the only way to use React. It's evident in React's new docs, that explicitly recommend frameworks.

Data point of one; I am new to next.js and tried both new and old ways. Decided on new way since it's slightly less worse than old way and it's the new way forward. After a few weeks, I've decided to dump it and just go with Vite. I can sprinkle SSR on top of it w/ plugin if needed. Much faster, much simpler DX, much smaller build output. I regret choosing Next.js and regret the decision to use it believing it's at least a good/decent choice based on popularity and default choice for most people.

Dev mode is also a lot slower in app router (well so is production). HMR feels like a crawl even on a fast machine.

Sorry about this. Do you have a GitHub issue with a reproduction we can look into? This is our top priority. In the meantime, I'd recommend continuing to use the Pages Router.

What's a full-stack TypeScript-based alternative that's good enough for most of us? I constantly bump into the complexity of NextJS myself, but so far I've powered through the pain.

Vite with trpc? I personally don't use the backend functionality of NextJS at all, I have my own backend (in Rust but I'd do the same in Node as well) that communicates via GraphQL to the frontend in NextJS, it's pretty nice.

What are you doing with trpc if your backend is in Rust? trpc is typescript to typescript

I never said I was using trpc, I was simply answering the parent's question about NextJS alternatives. But even with Rust, you can use a similar project called rspc that creates TS types from Rust.

I searched far and wide a few months ago and found these two are the only real contenders:

RedwoodJS

Remix

If I had to compare them, I would label Redwood as more of an "emberjs" type feel, very corpo, angular-js, "enterprise". Remix is more loose and new, fresh ideas that other frameworks have since attempted to copy.

Pick your poison.

Have you considered Deno? First class TypeScript support, secure sandboxing, and JIT rendering for React/Preact style projects with Fresh (https://fresh.deno.dev).

Also, they recently introduced a Node compatibility feature that supports _most_ modules. You can import directly from NPM using the npm: specifier, or import (almost) all of the builtin Node APIs using the standard node: specifier. Since recent versions (1.30+) of Deno are bundled with whats essentially a Node clone, and since its all packaged as a ~32MB executable... I've found myself just using Deno for everything lately. So far its been able to handle all of the projects I used to run with Node.

Check out their docs: https://deno.land/manual

(Author) It took me a bit to get used to the new patterns of building with the App Router. It seems harder for folks who have lots of experience building with the previous mental model, versus starting new from scratch. Some unlearning needed.

Apologies that you've ran into a few issues trying things out. We're working hard to patch up some of these. If you have any specifics, please let me know and we can look into them.

You might want to consider Qwik which uses React syntax to create components and can be very easy to develop performant web applications

> Im sure for big ambitious companies this focus on performance is great

On the contrary, the performance with the new method is even worse.

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