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Comment by athesyn | Hacker News Reader

Hooks solved a real problem and I have not heard a single experienced React developer say a negative thing about them.

Totally agree. I've been developing with React for a couple years and before that I was an Android developer for about a decade. React is such a breeze to use compared to the complexity that goes into developing with other frontend frameworks.

Okay, I’ll volunteer. Hooks solve a real problem in a really unidiomatic way that makes real code hard to understand. They put invisible function boundaries around return values and create state machines inside the body of functions which don’t correspond to the actual function body.

I could say the same thing about Solid and its reactivity, and I have. But at least with Solid you know where the magic begins: an opening JSX tag. With hooks, it’s everwhere and you can’t know where magic and non-magic share a space because it’s externalized to linters which have limited capabilities to cross module boundaries.

I don’t like any of this magic but I’ll take “it happens predictably at an angle bracket with a well defined next character” any day.

The magic used by react is very limited, one just really has to look a certain way for a few function calls, as if they were declarations and not abuse it. It’s also not particularly hard to grok what’s behind the “magic” if someone is that inclined - there are frameworks with orders of magnitude more of that.

Sure, solid is better in that respect, but react couldn’t have done any other way if it wants to work without a compile-phase.

Both of them have the same magic, just different variations of it. They both create artificial thunks around something, with special memoizations you haven’t defined right outside of them. React does it at the outside of a component, regardless of how the component is defined. Solid does it at the outside of the outermost angle braces of the returned JSX expression. Both are “spooky action” as the saying goes. Both are “at a distance”, but Solid can much more easily be reasoned about.

And I have no idea why people (including React team members) keep saying React doesn’t have a compiler. That’s literally the only thing that makes it not plain JS.

Edit: and the compiler isn’t as specialized as Solid’s dom-expressions, but it’s definitely not just a DSL over an otherwise equivalent function call. There are special cases for specific props, and they have similar special case rules with Solid. And that special casing has only been more true over time, some people used to write React.createElement directly, but I think approximately no one writes the new jsx(…) directly because it’s specifically intended to be a compile target.

Yeah, I jumped ship from Marionette / Backbone when hooks came around, they finally got me to go "wow, that's way way better".

I've used react daily since the early days. I like hooks but I don't really know what the _real_ problem was that they solved. Getting rid of class components?

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