Check out Vite: https://vitejs.dev/
`npm create vite@latest`
run through the process
--> `added 217 packages`
Also, what's Vite? The React docs mention Next.js, Remix, or Gatsby. At what point would any of these become deprecated?
To be clear, I'm just complaining, but you could change the OP's question to read as "How in the world can this number of <dependencies/frameworks/paradigms/languages> be considered sane and normal, and most of all, necessary?" and it would still make sense
Yes, those frameworks themselves still have hundreds of sub-dependencies, but usually they're managed by the upstream framework maintainers and upgraded at once. Like you upgrade your Next/Remix/Vite version and then rest of it should take care of itself, with (usually) the framework vendor providing detailed changelogs and code migration tools if necessary. It's not a perfect system but it's a heck of a lot easier than it used to be.
And once you build for production, those hundreds of libs just get tree-shaken and bundled into a few much smaller minified and compressed JS files, and often rehydrated only after the important HTML loads. Done right, it can be better UX than the old SPA days -- at a cost of increased slightly increased mental complexity for developers, but not much more than having to work full-stack in different languages.
The ecosystem is very slowly maturing. IMHO we're probably post-peak now. The last 5-7 years had a huge explosion of JS frameworks because, well, that's the language of the web, and we saw a ton of startup activity. But now that the industry is moving towards AI instead, the web is no longer cool, and probably we'll see a lot less competition/innovation and more consolidation/stagnation. I doubt many of these frameworks will survive long term. My personal guess (only) is that we'll probably only be left with Next and Vite(*) after a few years, with the others fading into history the way Ember, Backbone, Angular, etc. did.
> At what point would any of these become deprecated?
Probably 2-4 years, if history is any indication. They just get less popular and less maintained over time, but there'll always be a long tail of older unmaintained projects running on life support with vulnerable versions, etc. But most projects will move on. In my career as a web dev, I've never seen production frontend code last more than a couple years without drastic changes anyway, so I doubt it really matters. Good excuse for the next generation to rewrite everything from scratch for the nth time, lol. Management's visions and priorities rarely last that long to begin with, so it all just kinda works out... shrug.
I wouldn't build a time capsule in JS, but for websites that by their nature are ephemeral... sure, why not?
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* Vite is just a simple frontend processor and bundler: https://vitejs.dev/guide/features.html
It includes things like TypeScript, JSX, hot module replacement... etc., that used to be a bunch of separate libs. It's heavier than vanilla JS, but much lighter than Next.js. Great for simple SPAs, but if you need more batteries included, Next can get you (much) further before you start having to add in more third-party packages again.
Think of these like a Venn diagram. Vite is a small circle that has a lot of overlap with Next's much bigger circle.
That’s not true. https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project
Vite fans recommend Vite, but that doesn’t change the official documentation.
Really interesting guy. Good podcast here: https://corecursive.com/vue-with-evan-you/ and very, very much worth a listen.
His background isn't even software engineering but he has come to spearhead (at least?) two very major projects that have shaped modern web development: Vue and Vite. Both Vue and Vite are notably "simple" and fast relative to their contemporaries.
Vue really stands out as one of the few, pure community driven front-end frameworks that has achieved major uptake (both React and Angular came from the commercial space).
I mean I would usually go with NextJS since it just works so well with Vercel, providing a really convincing, complete solution.
But I will check out Vite nonetheless, curious how it fares against it...
It is 100x better. :)
Yea guess I'll stick with NextJS
They've removed a ton of pain from full stack React/JS/TS
My new project requirements for well with NextJS. I was mainly pointing out that there are a number of benefits for the drawbacks.
If you're just building a SPA, using Next is overkill (and will often get in the way, actually). But for some other websites, having all of that included and supported by a single source/vendor is very valuable and beats trying to Frankenstein a project out of 30 other libs like the bad old initial days of React.
For simpler or client-only sites, Vite is actually wonderful. But it's not automatically the best choice for every project.