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by Solvency 1106 days ago
But... 99% of insert-startup-product-built-on-React (or honestly, any framework) is typically super slow (for whatever reason that might be). Sluggish, not super responsive, laggy UI, however you want to describe it. A far cry from the snappiness of desktop apps from 25+ years ago.

Something or some collection of people are doing something wrong, somewhere in the chain. So isn't this just yet another way to further entrench the modern state of meh-ness in performant UI?

3 comments

Your statement is very broad. Might be the startup culture and lacking technological expertise, no?

Was insert-startup-product-built-on-.NET fast 15 years ago, for example?

Not trying to be controversial, just wondering.

I agree that a product built by clueless developers stringing together random libraries or bad custom code in React would create slow products.

In your spirit, I might argue that thinking "reactively" and client-centric tends to lead to unneeded requests.

Developing without meaningful API contracts or basic CS skills also makes it easy to unintendedly blow up network payloads.

Caching is hard though.

Have you worked on bad PHP applications that reload on every interaction without caching?

As someone who has had the misfortune of working on poorly tuned WordPress and Drupal websites in a former life I can confirm this is an issue of culture, not and axiom of whether SPAs are intrinsically faster or slower.
manual network state sync between frontend and backend is the root cause of that
> A far cry from the snappiness of desktop apps from 25+ years ago

So apps without network latency are faster? Huh.