[kaba0]

The magic used by react is very limited, one just really has to look a certain way for a few function calls, as if they were declarations and not abuse it. It’s also not particularly hard to grok what’s behind the “magic” if someone is that inclined - there are frameworks with orders of magnitude more of that.

Sure, solid is better in that respect, but react couldn’t have done any other way if it wants to work without a compile-phase.

[eyelidlessness]

Both of them have the same magic, just different variations of it. They both create artificial thunks around something, with special memoizations you haven’t defined right outside of them. React does it at the outside of a component, regardless of how the component is defined. Solid does it at the outside of the outermost angle braces of the returned JSX expression. Both are “spooky action” as the saying goes. Both are “at a distance”, but Solid can much more easily be reasoned about.

And I have no idea why people (including React team members) keep saying React doesn’t have a compiler. That’s literally the only thing that makes it not plain JS.

Edit: and the compiler isn’t as specialized as Solid’s dom-expressions, but it’s definitely not just a DSL over an otherwise equivalent function call. There are special cases for specific props, and they have similar special case rules with Solid. And that special casing has only been more true over time, some people used to write React.createElement directly, but I think approximately no one writes the new jsx(…) directly because it’s specifically intended to be a compile target.