Comment by NayamAmarshe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NayamAmarshe | Hacker News Reader

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When I first discovered Next.js, it was like finding a gold-mine. I no longer had to use an express server and couple that with React and manage all the crazy configs. Next.js was so simple, everything just worked!

The docs were absolutely amazing, dev server was super fast, the build times were fast, I could easily create server side and static sites, host them on Vercel easily, good times all around.

Then came the Vercel + React partnership and it took things in a different direction. Now React almost became a child of Vercel. All of a sudden, the focus instantly shifted to server side from what was earlier client side & server side both. Breaking changes, added complexity and the strange co-existence of 2 routers, out of which the old one (which works perfectly fine btw) is certainly set to become obsolete in the near future leaving us with no choice but to move to this 'new' router.

Next.js app router is extremely slow. You don't even need to do anything special, just compare the dev server compile times of Next.js v12 vs v14, the performance has decreased. The dev server sometimes occupies gigabytes of memory, why?

Can I also mention the 'new' but worse file-based routing system that forces every page to be named page.tsx? Who thought that was a good idea? They simply copied Sveltekit. This even forced the VSCode team to introduce a way to edit the tab names because every page being called page.tsx is undoubtedly worse DX!

All good things come to an end, and I certainly feel this way now with Next.js. I was a proponent, I recommended it to everybody who was looking to build apps with React but now? I'm not so sure anymore, considering how confused they are about their own decisions (refer to the v14's caching controversy).

I'll be jumping ship to a better product as soon as I find one (and I'm sure there will be in the future). For now, I'm just sticking because of the years of familiarity with React.js and Next.js. They have served me well but Next.js has simply become Outdated.js as far as the future is concerned.

Next.js jumped the shark with the app router. The page router, though it wasn't perfect, was a nice fit and was an extension of the React way (at the time) by handling the client-side well. You got routing and some ability to execute certain things on the server-side plus basic api support. For everything else you could use a full express backend or even other backend languages/stacks. But like with many things, simplicity could not be appreciated and now you have this mess. It's time for a better alternative.

I think Inertia.js is the answer to this. It’s just some “glue” to make React/Vue/Svelte play nice (as the views) for any of the battle proven frameworks like Laravel, Django, Rails… or Adonis if you want to stay in node for the backend

Been working with React for the past 9 years and I hate what Vercel's influence has done to it. I hate what they've done to Next as well, but at least that one is theirs.

It’s a very shady company, and despite what it looks like, they’re more a marketing company than a tech one.

I’m glad I noticed this early and stopped using Next on time. For me the thing that made me realize this was their “hiding” (for as much as they can) and making it more difficult than intended of the call home metrics system in next. They refuse to add a setting to turn that off, and instead want you to set an env variable or run a npm command.

Just think about they do this and refuse to add a setting.

That’s how you know who you’re dealing with.

I have the same feeling, Vercel is destroying React.

> The dev server sometimes occupies gigabytes of memory, why?

My strong suspicion is async locals. I found some references to next related async locals hanging on timers recently: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/6/5/node-timeout/

What was wrong with Express.js? No, what is wrong with it right now? Because all I see is Next.js just being a wrapper for what Express.js does.

Also, Next.js is becoming like Angular: The progress from Angular.js 1 to Angular 18 was necessary for solving the problem of very hard front-end web development. So I'm guessing this Next.js contender is trying to become the Angular of the back-end. They're basically turning into the theoretical computer science constructs that they must become. Script kiddies and non-computer science students need not apply.

Building a product on Express is like making a sandwich by growing wheat and raising cattle. Sure Next is a wrapper around Express; JavaScript is a wrapper around assembly. Yet some people don’t have time to do everything from scratch again and just want a sensible framework to build upon.

Express is like making a sandwich by buying bread, meat, and condiments from the super market. NextJS is like buying a sandwich from a vending machine.

The biggest issue with apps like NextJS is that they didn't explicitly build upon and expose the Express API. What they should have done is client-side app routing with a version of Express that runs route handlers in the browser. They also needed to add parallel middleware that runs in both a browser and server context. That's the only sane way to support functionality and components that run in both the server and browser context.

The entire NextJS architecture is flawed because they picked the wrong pivot point.

We want to be making sandwiches from store-bought components. Sometimes we do need to swap out the bread and NextJS has the wrong abstractions to do so which results in all sorts of soon-to-be-breaking-changes-spaghetti to work-around the deficiencies.

It would have been much better to maintain an application by working directly with requests, request middleware and request route handlers, with a mock request corresponding to mouse events for the client-side.

The request-response cycle is the fundamental nature of the web application, even in the browser.

Due to economies of scale, the massive manufacturing of your theoretical sandwiches with your own wheat and cattle agriculture should be cheaper in the end on a large scale (compared to the present alternative). And at that large scale it is the only effective and practical choice. So, we can infer the general conclusion that there are multiple and different types of software development with the existence of things like Express.js and Next.js. Namely real developers and lowly developers like cows on a factory line.

This comparison is unreasonably disproportional.

> What was wrong with Express.js?

Setting it up was a hassle and so was hosting it. It's a great tool, don't get me wrong but after using Next.js, I never needed it.

There's also Hono (https://hono.dev) now, which is like Express.js but better.

> Setting it up was a hassle and so was hosting it.

How is it possible that there are people active in this industry who think setting up Express is a hassle?

They got promoted to senior+ and run the show. “Greybeards go home, the future is now”?

How does one set up express and host a web server correctly?

>hono

Seems absolutely the same to me, their getting started shows no login mw (only already token-ed auth), and it’s just a single context param instead of (req, res, next, res.{text,json}). What’s so innovative there? Feels like yet another cute solution looking for a problem.

You know what, I thought Next.js was a backend framework. I must be thinking of something else. I mistakenly have confused one thing with another. So never mind lol

You might be thinking of Nest.js.

Something something Dropbox

That Dropbox thing is just a meme which I don't understand. I'm not "in" on the joke, if you will. I don't see how the Dropbox meme is relevant here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

A part of HN history, if you will, making light fun of the "it's just a wrapper" idea that transitions into a multi billion dollar company, because only naively is execution and the integration of different ideas a trivial task. The people at NextJS are obviously(?) doing something that's not just Express and you can look at the version history if you are interested in identifying those things.

Of course, you might not think of them as important. But that's a very different take.

There’s https://vike.dev/ though that still feels a bit rough to me compared to Next.

This looks nice, first time I’m seeing it. Just curious, what feels rough?

Just the way everything hangs together. It works, but some things are in the code, but not the docs, mentioned on the site, but the init tool they refer has no facility for it, so you need to connect it yourself.

What about SvelteKit?

I'm not a fan of Svelte's cryptic syntax and constant changes. They started with something simple, which is why I decided to build upscayl.org's simple website with SvelteKit but now it's simply too much of a hassle when I compare it with Next.js.

They changed their whole state management system. It's like using a totally new framework now and it looks very much like React which is strange because Svelte was supposed to not be like React and offer simplicity in code.

I think the best contender right now Solid.js but it needs some financial help and the fanciness of Next.js to attract a larger developer base.

I share your frustration around the constantly high amount of changes in fundamental concepts, but overall I still feel like SvelteKit gets lots of things right that Next doesn’t.

I think SolidStart framework brings Svelte's and React's strong points together very well. I'm really interested in how it grows, I can say that it has a brighter future than Next or Sveltekit.

Unfortunately Solid's velocity has been kinda weak for awhile and it's missing its own hype. At this point Svelte is many many times bigger than Solid.

Are you talking about svelte 5? (Serious question)

Yes, the one with runes.

Yep, Svelte 5 with Runes was so much like React that I literally asked how it was any different when their announcement first came out [0]. Evan You, the creator of Vue, also noted its similarities to Vue [1]. They kind of answered the question but when actually working with Svelte 5, it simply feels like a reskin of React.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37584224#37584877

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37584224#37592471

Yeah I was a huge fan of Svelte 4. I haven’t used react at all, but I took one look at svelte 5 and I just felt sad.

I’ve gone back to Vue for now.

Svelte is a ton of magic, which is great if you like that sort of thing but every time I've tried it I've been frustrated and disappointed, and converted the project to something else.

Join us on the Vue side! Using Vue and Nuxt (if you need SSR) has been an absolute joy to work with in my experience

I want to like Vue but the combination of buggy language tools and a buggy metaframework left a bad taste in my mouth. It's not surprising either when you look at the code quality.

I've always admired Nuxt because it's always been the one to introduce amazing features that Next has always copied but I never gave it a try.

Maybe it's time.

It’s not like they didn’t break everyone as well…

They did?

Vue2/vue3 ? I know of several companies that haven’t been able to update yet, and some probably won’t ever.

A company I workerd for has a large nuxt app they won’t be to upgrade any time soon.

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