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Comment by rafark | Hacker News Reader

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rafark·

>For almost 10 years, the core react developers would repeat incessantly: React is a library, not a framework.

I always disliked the it’s a library not a framework debate. Isn’t any library a framework, technically?

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You call a library as you see fit. A framework calls you.

Oh yeah. I guess that's why we always invoke function components directly. Because it's a library.

What do you think you're doing when you call render(<App />,...)?

Not calling App. Creating a react element with a reference to the function. The reconciler will call it later, asynchronously. Put in some console logs and see the order of operations for yourself.

Also, try calling App and see what happens if it uses hooks.

The createElement function is called immediately, and it immediately calls your component function. I don't think this is a significant difference. Many libraries accept a callback and I'm really not ready to call all that a framework just based on that.

createElement is immediate. The component function call is not. It may never be called. Try const a = <App />;

App() will never be called.

Yeah, it will be called when you call render as in my original comment. Again, I don't think that passing a callback makes a framework.

When you combine that with the fact that you can't invoke the function directly, this seems like the textbook definition to me. Agree to disagree I guess.

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