Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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One trouble I see with React is that it doesn't have a complete answer to state management. I was building very complex AJAX apps around 2006 or so such as knowledge graph editors and decision support software using tools like GWT and Silverlight that had the same async comm as Javascript and was developing state management systems that were so far ahead of React, Vue and that sort of thing that when I came across those frameworks I was seriously disappointed.

I've got the feeling that I can render anything I want the way I want with React (even 3-d worlds!) but the only framework that comes close to what my old systems could do is

https://mobx.js.org/README.html

and I cannot understand why MobX isn't more popular than it is. (Worked fine for a websocket-based app to control my smart speakers, it was trivial to make it so adjusting the speaker volume through the mobile app or buttons was reflected on my web app. Never tried a bigger app)

MobX can be slow. Example for me, and maybe I just did it wrong. Made a photo gallery viewer (so a page of a few hundred thumbnails). Have options in the toolbar for whether to show the filename, date, location, on each thumbnail. Use MobX to make those settings reactive. Result, it runs way way way too slow since each of the hundred thumbnails is doing some complicated check to read the value of the reactive state variables. I can fix that by having some higher level component (like the thumbnail gallery) read the value and then pass it down to all the thumbnails. But, the point is, I had to work around the fact that it's slow rather than just do the obvious thing and have each thumbnail look at the state it's interested in and not have to have higher level components deal with it. In other words, I want to be able to add features to Thumbnail without having to modify ThumbnailCollection but because it was too slow I now have to modify two places (or 3 or 4) instead of one.

Wonder why. We’ve got thousands of conditionally rendered components on a pretty interactive scheduling screen. One click can affect all of them but everything feels instantaneous.

Our bottleneck was that we have so much data, making it all observable up front led to slow initial load times and high memory usage. We now make things observable on demand which has eliminated a lot of that.

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