React is unreadable and bloated with 20,368 commits and seemingly unstable with the maintainers always pivoting it around. I like it's semantics, but don't want to deal with updating it long term as a dependency.
Genuinely curious: why does a low number of commits, and mostly commits from one person, give you confidence to keep it around long term?
Contributions being mostly from a single developer lends further credence to that idea, because it implies everything is fueled by one person's relatively opinionated vision and taste.
A single(-ish) author is the strongest smell for a library. I've been burned countless times by a project's "BDFL" moving on to something else. Sometimes a new maintainer will take over, but it's rare.
Low commit count also suggests unresponsiveness to issues that are filed, especially for a TypeScript or JavaScript project.
This thread single-handedly convinced me not to start a Solid project.
SolidJS (Ryan mostly) is very responsive, so the low count is more a sign that there are not many issues which require code changes in the first place. Which is good!
>Sometimes a new maintainer will take over, but it's rare.
SolidJS really doesn't need a full-time maintainer at this point. One or more community members fixing severe bugs and keeping it up to date is plenty enough.
Yeah exactly 7 years tomorrow. Wow time flies.
React has been around for much longer than Solid, and also much much more popular, with many more contributors. It's also the pioneer of virtual DOM reactivity, when you're a pioneer there bound to be some trial and error.
It can also be argued that SolidJS has a higher bus factor, as it's still very dependant on the creator (Ryan Carniato).
Sharing my experience... A while ago, I wanted to build an app using SolidJS 1.4 but got stuck because of a list mapping bug, ie. child list not updating IIRC. I reached out to Ryan, he said that he knew about the bug and had a fix coming in the next release. I couldn't wait, so I had to port what I had to React and call it a day.
The higher number of commits is, to some extent, empirical evidence that trials and errors were encountered.
> SolidJS has a higher bus factor.
For me personally, the higher bus factor is a feature, not a bug. Ryan has brought the project to a state of relative "completion." I can rest easy knowing that SolidJS would only need to be maintained, not "developed," if he were to leave.