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Comment by wg0 | Hacker News Reader

I was a big Sevelte fan. After writing a sizeable application in Sevelte I realized that React is superior in every way overall speaking and at least you're writing 100% pure JavaScript directly. Or Typescript.

Plus the ecosystem. It's huge. Nothing comes closer.

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You might be interested in solid.js. To me, it's easier to work with than React. What I like about it is that the reactivity model is small enough that you can understand it, and even implement a basic version yourself.

It also uses JSX, but since there's no virtual DOM, you can also write 100% JS, but, unlike React, you can do it without any special wrapper. So you don't need to use or write a `react-dnd`, just use any vanilla drag and drop library.

I've tried solid and it's much nicer on small projects. How well does it scale though? Modern React is also 'more functional' (for some definition) but it comes at a cost of cumbersome and leaky abstractions. Classic React walked a fine line of being 'just reactive enough'. You could make code declarative and composable while still micromanaging certain lifecycle and data dependency decisions that can be critical for performance.

I've built quite complex applications (e.g. a spreadsheet app) using SolidJS as a base layer, and in that sense it scales really well. It's very easy to separate data management from the UI, so architecturally it scales well, and performance-wise we rarely had issues with it at all.

The biggest issue is in finding people to work with it. If you're hiring React developers over web developers, they will probably struggle more with SolidJS's differences from React, in part because they just look so similar that there's more to "unlearn". But most web developer (i.e. anyone who can understand beyond just the confines of their favourite framework) should find it relatively easy to understand what's going on.

Implementing spreadsheets with fine-grained reactivity is basically cheating.

Haha, that was part of the reason we originally went down this route. In practice, as soon as you want to implement spills, you lose a lot of the benefits because the contents of a spill can depend on any other cell and affect almost any other cell, and you need to evaluate the spill to figure out which cells are relevant. In the end, we rewrote the spreadsheet engine to use a different mechanism that was simpler and that we could optimise better, and then hooked that into SolidJS for everything else.

I guess technically that part of the application didn't scale so well in SolidJS, but it scaled a lot better than it would have in any other framework, and we got to delay writing the engine "properly" until we'd already built everything else and got it running with real users in production.

This tracks exactly my experience described in sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275892

> 100% pure JavaScript directly

How did the React community convince so many people of this falsehood? Do that many people just not know what javascript is? It baffles me that one could look at JSX and be like, “that right there is vanilla javascript”.

JSX is basically just a subset of E4X.

Yeah man it’s pure JS trust me just add this little transpiler and you’re good to go. What do you mean you don’t have a bundler?

What people mean is obviously that you use JS primitives for looping, branching, conditionals, etc. over some DSL. Everybody knows that the tags are added syntax, there is no conspiracy here.

"These burgers are pure beef! Obviously what people mean is that beef is one of the ingredients. Everyone knows that the plastic is added in, there's no conspiracy here"

It's like arguing the moon and sun are the same size because they look the same size when looking at the sky. A hamburger with added plastic is essentially a hamburger. A hamburger made out of plastic that resembles beef is not.

I don't understand how you can interpret "pure means not adding in stuff to water it down" as "everything that's vaguely similar is the same", because from my perspective that's exactly what the parent comment I responded to is doing

vanila javascript would not be far off, just replace the tags with function calls. In early versions of react, there were people who wrote code like that. For some reason web devs since collectively agreed that the xml syntax is essential to web technologies

History is important here. React came at a time when so many frameworks used custom template libraries for variable binding, looping, conditionals, etc. Usually it was some HTML/XML-like markup language.

Could you expand on your experience compared to react?

I had main issue with smaller ecosystem. Very limited components and everything else is geared towards React. Take React Query for example. If you want first class data caching and retry logic etc, then Svelte support was second class at least couple of years ago.

Same goes for component libraries.

>Sevelte

FYI: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/svelte

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