Comment by wk_end | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wk_end | Hacker News Reader

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I think (at least part of) the reason why React has been so successful is that is scales so well: it's actually a relatively simple tool that works well for small problems. Pair it with a Vite template or something and you can be up-and-running in minutes. But it continues working pretty well as your app gets bigger, too.

But where React fails is actually in more complex scenarios. Prop drilling becomes tedious or intractable, so now we have all these different ways to manage state (Context, Redux, MobX, Recoil, Zustand, Jotai...). Your re-rendering gets slow, so now you need to start sprinkling React.memo() all over the place and adding reselect (or re-reselect!) queries and restructuring or denormalizing your store data, but then it turns out some of your props are objects that are regenerating each render cycle, so you need to memoize those too, and you end up on a wild goose chase there. Or your engineers were sloppy and accidentally put some side-effects into your components, so you've got subtle bugs you're not sure how to fix. And there's a lot of complexity or even unanswered questions around things like robustly fetching data your component needs, and maybe React Router answers them but then you end up down a whole other rabbit hole, especially when a new version of React Router comes out and breaks everything.

The amazing thing about React to me is that millions of dollars keep flowing into improving its DX further. They have spent a lot of time building React Compiler (https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler/introduction) which does all the memoization for you! This severely lightens the performance concerns.

Sure, but Svelte and Vue have had these compilation features built-in for ages without all that money flowing in.

The react team resisted these features because they went against their “it’s just a library” philosophy. They’re only copying them now because of how obviously useful they are in the other frameworks.

useEffect, useMemo, useCallback etc. add a ton of complexity and make it easy to write buggy code. I used to work at an agency so I’ve done projects with React/Svelte/Vue/Lit/Stencil/Angular/etc. I found the React projects had lots more performance issues, confusing bugs, etc. than Vue or Svelte.

I agree with the article. React is popular because it was groundbreaking and now is the default, but it’s far from the best

Vue and Svelte both feel like down stream evolutions in their own respective ways (and likely overlapping).

I think React can be approached a little like JavaScript at this point: just use the good parts!

In my case that means using it as a rendering library and component composer, but not for managing state or side-effects.

This is exactly how I feel. I gave hooks a real, exclusive try for two years after they were introduced (2018-2020). I didn't like them—at all—so I went back to only using React as a UI library. I'm lucky enough now to work at a place where nobody else likes hooks either.

Appreciate the tips.

Agreed. Like too much javascript, keeping in mind what it takes to get something running vs keeping it running is a consideration.

There are some fantastic rendering tools in React like Remotion.

I had problems with prop drilling on early projects but since Context has been around it hasn't been an issue. Never bothered with all these state management libraries, any time someone on my team has tried to sell me on it they've never made a strong case for it over simple proper react state management. useEffect took a little getting used to - it becomes much less problematic when you learn which scenarios to use it in (fewer than you initially think). I've had to use React.memo() at times, but it's usually done in a simple optimization pass not unlike something I'd do in a backend framework.

The only time I am even aware of these problems is when I stick my head into the javascript frontend framework "scene" where everyone acts like each one of these are dealbreakers and they happen constantly all the time.

Life is actually pretty easy as a React dev, it's a well polished and at this point battle tested framework. I wish the other tools in my dev stack were as easy to deal with.

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