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by VMtest 603 days ago
From users' point of view, they only care about the performance really

Some e-commerce apps use React in WebView on Android and the apps will become unresponsive after visiting several product pages (more than 10 probably). They have to be force closed and opened to be used again

3 comments

This has the essential bits of one of the most common critiques of React, its claimed slowness.

As a seasoned React dev of 10 years (aka a heavily biased person) I would claim 99% of this issue is better explained by: - React is the most popular choice => used in all kinds of places by all kinds of people - with varying skill - under all kinds of business pressure to deliver features => a lot of slow apps in React

I'm not saying a case for specific areas where React is slow can not be made, these anecdotes just don't do it for me.

We do have the synthetic framework benchmark, where React is indeed one of the slower candidates. I have yet to build an app with functionality akin to adding 10s of millions of rows, so it has not been an instructive decision driver for technology choice. The project I have been working on (also in Vue, Svelte, SwiftUI) had their bottlenecks in other places.

The non-synthetic argument in favor of React passing the performance test is billions of people using FB, Insta, Netflix, MS Office (to name some of the big React apps), about which I have not much in terms of complaints.\ This is usually where the second big React critique kicks in: it being a Fortune-500 framework. That has not been my non-fortune-ate experience.

I think a residual argument can still survive this: I/my org has not been able to write performant React. I'd be curious to read someone go into the details of where it broke down and how switching view layers solved for that specific situation (I hope that does not read cynical, I'd really be curious).

reply to my own comment

reddit switch from reactjs to lit for performance reasons

https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/12yxva6/whats_you_...

nothing is wrong with react, performance is obviously depending on how optimization is done

Yeah. And that’s basically the thing, right?

If I need to hit a certain performance because the business has concluded that it matters, and React can’t get us there, then I’m likely switching to Svelte or whatnot.

If none of my tools can do the job, I’m going to the store and buying a new tool and learning how to use it. I don’t feel ideologically attached to my palm sander. I’ll buy a belt sander if the palm doesn’t make sense for a task.

But your tools can't do the "performance" job right now, it's just that there is enough "friction" in the management/decision chain that it may not be decided on by "the business".

Though the desire to improve without external pressure could be considered ideological

Hora do you know that? I've seen really well optimized React apps and very poorly optimized Svelte apps. It's not like using Svelte magically makes performance good. Just like using Unreal Engine doesn't mean that a game is optimized. You just have different, maybe better, tools to improve performance.