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Comment by compacct27 | Hacker News Reader

We’re slowly getting back to the “I don’t know who’s right” phase of web framework “innovation”.

I can at least tell that Next.js is winning on growth. More new startups are building with it according to the job boards I’m seeing, esp. compared to Remix and even the other contenders (Vue, Svelte)—-at least in the States.

Kent’s point about Vercel platform lock-in is pretty eye-opening, though. Not able to easily deploy Next.js outside of Vercel? And, it’s a platform ran by a startup? It’s also not profitable?

Um…

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I'm not really sure where the comment on Vercel platform lock-in is coming from. Personally I've deployed Next apps on Cloudflare Pages/Netlify, and I have multiple Next apps at work are all deployed via AWS codebuild or Github Actions (all hosted on AWS).

The process is very straightforward and requires little to no extra steps when compared to Vercel.

It's coming from the fact Next.js is all in on serverless, but the reference implementation for deploying it in a serverless environment is closed-source.

It's certainly possible you just don't use any of the features they're pushing in that direction, but I mean, they literally dropped basic Request compat just to enable serverless runtimes, and you can't use an img tag without being warned to use their Image Optimization feature, which has no open implementations...

Pretty much, most of the energy being spent on Next.js development is towards serverless deploys which use a build format that has to be reverse engineered by outside parties.

How is the implementation not open? They have it all on Github.

No they don't, hence projects like https://open-next.js.org/ and the multitude of stories of 3rd party serverless offerings being half-broken. They also keep breaking at time goes on since they're playing catch up on the build output:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/1685dyr/avoid_aws_a...

https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/160ui01/is_aws_ampl...

https://betterprogramming.pub/beware-of-next-js-on-aws-ampli...

To actually use the build output format, you need an implementation that Vercel does not open source.

Compare that to Remix which maintains an open reference implementation for their adapter format, which in turn makes supporting additional platforms incredibly simple.

It's not all in on serverless and saying so is spreading misinformation.

You can use (almost) all their backend features as if it's a single server (which it is in the end) and you can also use their image tag when self-hosting and it processes the images for you.

If you're annoyed and don't want to use their image tag, then disable the linting rule. However after having used it for a large scale e-commerce store I'm gonna be honest: It works damn good and not paying for Cloudinary or something along those lines is really nice

There are SOME questionable choices like the middleware only being compatible with an edge runtime that can't be turned off, but apart from that one it really is like any other SSR framework....

Edit: added an almost because well, middleware is pretty bad-ish

> I can at least tell that Next.js is winning on growth

According to a quick google search Vercel has raised at least $313M.

And less startups will be successful now then when most startups were using Rails. Next.js is not a fullstack framework. Never will be. Fullstack frameworks will never work in the NodeJS ecosystem as the community is incapable of landing on a single solution to do anything.

> We’re slowly getting back to the “I don’t know who’s right” phase of web framework “innovation”.

I think we've probably been there for over a decade since we left the PHP/Django/Rails + jQuery paradigm.

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