[Zababa]

> At first glance, this appears to be much more complex. React is a relatively simple DOM diffing library.

Their implementation is 2k lines of code. The React repo has 350k lines of code. The Rails repo has 336k lines of code (both of those according to tokei). Of course this includes tests, lots of other stuff, etc. But still, that's two orders of magnitude.

[iaml]

Note that react has a monorepo with a lot of tangentially related packages, such as devtools and alternative renders.

[Zababa]

That's true, it's hard to make a fair comparaison between the two.

[cztomsik]

preact is much simpler than react (~3KB), and whats weird, it's also faster

BTW: code is very easy to read/follow https://github.com/preactjs/preact/

[steelbrain]

LoC != Complexity. React has one job, and it does it really well, part of that 350k lines of code is a LOT of tests. Just because it has those tests doesn’t mean it’s “much more complex”.

My two cents :)

[Zababa]

After a naive removal of the tests (every folder and files that contains tests was deleted), React still has 190k lines of code.

> React has one job, and it does it really well

I'm not sure I agree. It's hard to compare without a minimal copy of React to see how small it can get, but I'm guessing it could be an order of magnitude smaller. For example, React supports different ways of doing things (class components, function compenents, hooks). Backwards compatibility is a great thing, but it's not the same as "having one job and doing it well", it's a different tradeoff. The React team has lots of people that depends on their code, and thus choose stability over being small and nimble. I think that's a responsible choice. But this leads to complexity, and losing the "having one job and doing it well".

As a more general remark, there's a cycle in software. React starts small and nimble, especially compared to the "jQuery behemots of the past". It gets really popular. So people start depending on it. So it grows, and grows, and grows. And then someone else comes out, maybe Photon, maybe Svelte, maybe something else. Compared to React, it's small and nimble. Maybe in 10 years, Photon will be really popular, will be 200k lines of code, and someone will build an alternative because it's too big and complex.

Edit: as a more meta-remark: My message is way longer than yours because I was trying to steelman my argument, and you didn't do the same with yours. Considering you made a small message "defending" React and I did a long one "defending" Photon, I think we already agree about the tradeoffs involved here.

[mhio]

Preact is React without the fluff - https://github.com/preactjs/preact

loc in a node project is hard to judge due to packages and the aforementioned mono repo difference, but the preact functional build artefact is an order of magnitude smaller: 129KiB v 8.2KiB

[nickkell]

I’m going to keep scrolling in search of a shorter comment

[kitd]

Why?

[pjgalbraith]

Good point I checked and it's nowhere near 350k LOC. React is a monorepo here are some numbers for the main packages, excluding tests:

react = 3k

react-dom = 15k

[kaba0]

It absolutely has a strong correlation with complexity.