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Comment by dimal | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone who has used Remix comment on the API stability?

AFAIK it’s built by the same folks as React-Router, and I have a distrust of that project because of the tendency to make large breaking changes in order to make things “better” according to some criteria. I’ve been through a few RR upgrades that required a lot of extra work because we were using some previously supported pattern that then disappeared. I like the look of Remix but I don’t want to get trapped in that kind of situation again.

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Most of RR’s breaking changes were years apart, which is way less often than almost all JS libraries.

But, Remix’s breaking changes start as future flags on the current major release and slowly become breaking changes over time.

That means you can incrementally adopt the breaking change so the upgrade isn’t all at once.

I don’t know anything about Remix but I was around when React Router was first launched. I remember strongly disliking the API and concluding that it got popular not because of any particular quality, but because its name was exactly what everybody typed into Google. That’s a nasty thing to say, but bear with me. Thing is, today, doesn’t suck at all!

I suspect the original author might’ve very much learned how to do API design on the fly when those first major versions of RR were shipped. Ie: the hard way, because every change they made caused a lot of complaining (for good reason maybe, but still! People complaining about your open source project is not fun)

So maybe if anyone has a nuanced and wise view of API design and versioning, it’s the RR people :-)

This is exactly what happened. Both Michael and Ryan have expressed this countless times in many talks that a lot of the API churn in early years was because they were learning just like everyone else.

Just migrated a couple of projects from remix 1 to remix 2. It wasn't a walk in the park, but it was well planned by their team, by first adding feature flags to v1 where you could slowly adopt v2 APIs, and then switch. I think you can even run v2 with a v1 API backport layer. So I think they have a good approach to stability vs improving their product.

The really hard part has been migrating other stuff like CJS to ESM, or upgrading other dependencies like cypress, but that is not related to remix.

Stable as jelly. As everything in the js ecosystem, sadly.

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