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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

Compared to what?

React is not huge. It’s just a library that converts strings to tags. Oh you want to use React? You want JSX — the only use case for the React library? You want routing and URLs and history and state management and … ok you don’t want a virtual DOM but you need it. And you need Babel and a build tool and a generator framework (because piecing it all together is too hard) and tree shaking and CSS (in JS!) and lots of weird and complex lifecycle hooks.

React is both bigger (in terms of bytes) and more complex than Angular.

So, to answer your question, React is more complex than just about everything. I’d like to see you find a more complex framework.

Sometimes it feels like those who would develop the next React should really just try to develop the next web browser. Why spend all this time and effort building what is essentially a massive wad of chewing gum and paperclips to take what is essentially a glorified document reader and make it into an application platform?

We can run other executables on our local. The web itself is the problem and what needs to die to give way to something new.

A lot of those “apps” are just dynamic documents and forms that still fits the web model. It’s just that SPA is a bad architecture for them. Why push rendering to the client if all the data comes from the backend or need a round trip through there?

But something like Figma, Slack is indead a huge hack in terms of technology, but it would be way less code and more performance to just have native desktop apps.

The honest answer is because all your users have that wad of chewing gum and paper clips installed on their devices already, and you don't need an IT admin to whitelist your executable to install it in the contexts where that's still necessary.

You forgot to mention the chaos of npm CVE transitive dependency hell.

I worked with large React and large Angular (1 and 2+) codebases. I even migrated projects between them.

I genuinely don't understand how Angular is considered simpler than React.

Both have a build step. React hasn't needed a "generator" for years now (if you mean stuff like CRA). With tools like Vite or RSBuild, it's like 2 lines. Yeah, the JSX needs to be compiled, but so do templates, custom CSS dialect, and TS's old/non-standard decorators in Angular.

Angular has way more quirks and reactivity foot guns than React. I think major React adoption painpoint is hooks, but while they are clunky, they're way "easier to hold" than most Angular tools.

Same when it comes to state management libraries in angular, but I digress.

Anything - it's like 10kb

More like 5-10x that.

Technically, yes. But the reality is almost nobody uses "just" React. There's typically tons and tons of other dependencies.

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