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Comment by ZebulonP | Hacker News Reader

(to be transparent - I'm a Cloudflare engineer)

The behavior isn't entirely the same and reaching 100% parity is a non-goal, but there are a few things to note.

This is still a very early implementation and there are undoubtedly issues with the implementation that weren't covered in next's original test suite (and thus not inherited) while not being obvious enough to pop up with all the apps we've tried so far.

As for why it's so much smaller, by building on top of Vite and their react + rsc plugins there is a whole lot of code that we don't need to write. That's where a significant portion of the LOC difference comes from.

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Why is parity a non-goal? The blog post states:

> The result, vinext (pronounced "vee-next"), is a drop-in replacement for Next.js

"Drop-in" in my mind means I can swap the next dependency for the vinext dependency and my app will function the same. If the reality is that I have to spend hours or days debugging obscure edge cases that appear in vinext, I wouldn't exactly call that a drop-in replacement. I understand that this is an early version and that it doesn't have parity yet, but why state that it is a non-goal? For many of us, that makes vinext a non-choice, unless we choose to develop for vinext from the beginning.

Furthermore, if you're making a tool that looks almost like a well-known and well-documented tool, but not quite, how is gen AI going to be able to deal with the edge cases and vinext-specific quirks?

Changing the definition of drop-in definitely has me concerned and makes me not take this any seriously than other projects open-sourced by Cloudflare, particularly the ones focused on more critical parts of their systems – e.g. pingora and ecdysis.

Makes me wonder how the hell all the tests passed?!

Yeah I'm curious about all the routing edge cases, form actions, server functions etc, since that is where most of the complexity of the app router comes from. Does it encrypt captured values inside closures sent to the client? Stuff like that.

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