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Comment by alex_lav | Hacker News Reader

> I just restarted a personal project on rails because of its batteries included mentality - it means I can limit the number of dependencies

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/main/Gemfile.lock

Just a playful comment - not challenging your experience

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Sure, but the framework cares about that for me. I don’t use rails personally but that’s the whole point — someone upstream of me is paying attention and making everything work together.

In contrast, I have work apps made in React that need regular piecemeal updating — routers, form libraries, query managers, CSS — because we’ve chosen to cobble that together ourselves. That’s fine, that’s the path we chose knowingly when we picked the tech we picked, but the point isn’t that frameworks don’t have dependencies — it’s that they take on more of the burden of managing them for you.

Well, Next is kinda like that then. It takes care of the sub-dependencies for you and when you upgrade, you just upgrade to the next major Next version (which isn't necessarily easy, but more so than upgrading 100 individual packages). They provide codemods for some stuff too.

I suspect that most rails, or next, projects add additional dependencies than just the framework. Generally the framework isn't the issue in my experience.

Sure, but it's not an either/or situation. Every big project adds dependencies, but using Next means you have some basic, common functionality included out of the box by default/by convention (like TypeScript, linting, testing, routing, caching, SSR, static builds, serverless definitions, etc.) all done in a predefined way. Maybe your project has 200 deps, but Next would replace like 50 of the big ones that you'd otherwise have to separately install and maintain. Just having a basic page/app router and minimal state system (via contexts and RSC and props and such) reduces a lot of the headaches of the bad old React Router days.

It replaces "React soup of the day" with a more standard "recipe" shared by most Next projects – like "Grandma Vercel's secret React minestrone", I guess. But yes, projects would typically still add their own "spices" on top of those basics.

Next is like rails 2. Eventually they will get to rails-like abilities.

I'd say Clojure and java ecosystem is miles ahead of rails as well, but for this project I don't want to play in that garden.

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