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Comment by skew-aberration | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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