[acdha]

The JS ecosystem definitely has a big problem from the culture developed in the IE6 era where people developed so many packages working around the limited language and runtime, but React does have part of the blame here: the way it’s designed forces everything into its proprietary model instead of web standards, so you end up with tons of components duplicating other projects but in React or providing shims for those projects, Facebook’s big devrel push prioritized getting started quickly on a proof of concept rather than maintaining a larger app so you had things like Create React App adding nearly 40k dependencies before you had written a single line of code, and the culture of focusing JavaScript over built-in browser functionality (which made some sense in the 2000s when you had users stuck with IE6) means that you’re going a lot of work in runtime JavaScript rather than the browsers’ heavily-optimized C++ – and it’s often hard to change that because it’s not a direct dependency but a nested chain.

This is also why it’s slow and memory hungry: it’s not just the inherent inefficiency of the virtual DOM but also that having such a deep tree makes it hard to simplify - and since interoperability makes it cheaper to switch away, framework developers have conflicting incentives about making it easier.

[djbusby]

> inherent inefficiency of the virtual DOM

I was around when vDOM was being called optimized.

I was also around when they called it DHTML.

Get off my lawn!

[acdha]

Same (I started writing JavaScript when it was called LiveScript in the Netscape betas), and I remember how the vDOM hype was conspicuously short on rigorous benchmarks – people would compare it to heavyweight frameworks which did things like touch elements repeatedly or do innerHtml cycles and say it was fast.

[rerdavies]

I remember when all web pages were set in Times New Roman on a gray background. Unless you were browsing the web using a console application.

[int_19h]

More specifically, they would use the default font, which IE in particular had set to Times New Roman, so that is what most people saw. To add insult to injury, there was no way to configure it for a very long time.

To this day I wonder if this particularly strange choice of a serif font that is very clearly intended primarily for printed documents rather than on-screen legibility is why this entire notion of using user-selected fonts for web pages has largely withered. What if they went with, say, Verdana instead?

[d3Xt3r]

Same, except my web backgrounds were in sepia. I had one of those old sepia monochrome monitors, so no grey for me. Or colors for that matter.

I even made my first website on that monitor (complete with animated gifs and <blink>, of course) - and seeing it finally on a color monitor was... interesting.

[int_19h]

When was vDOM ever called DHTML?

I was around for DHTML days, and as I recall, it was just a generic term for the ability to manipulate the actual (not virtual) DOM programmatically from JS.

[mirekrusin]

React has two dependencies at runtime [0] and react-dom adds one more [1] (two are shared)?

[0] https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=react

[1] https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=react-dom

[strogonoff]

Can’t help being sarcastic: I have seen a couple of “I ditched React” post-mortems that apparently start with “I decided to stop adding poorly vetted dependencies with poor package maintenance practices”, just worded differently.

It is unsurprising to me if the router library is the first accused. When I was starting with a new project where I am using React, I went through a bunch of router libraries. There are tons, it seems like a low-hanging fruit with many implementations and many people trying to make a living off theirs (can’t blame them for it, unless they make changes for the sake of making changes and to incentivise people to pay for support). Ultimately, I found something off in every one, so I… just decided to not use any!

That is the thing, React is a small rendering library[0] and you are free to build whatever you want around it with as many or as few dependencies as you want. If the ecosystem is popular enough, there will be dependency tree monsters (simply because the ecosystem is extensive and using many dependencies allows package authors to make something impressive with less effort); switching to a less popular ecosystem as a way of dealing with that seems like a solution but a bit of a heavy-handed one.

[0] Though under Vercel it does seem to suffer from a bit of feature creep, RSC and all that, it is still pretty lean and as pointed out has two packages total in its dependency tree (some might say it’s two too many, but it is a far cry from dependency hell).

[nine_k]

> React is a small rendering library

Sorry, can't agree. React is a state management library that also implements efficient rendering on top of the DOM diff it computes as it propagates the state changes.

This allows React apps to remain so simple (one mostly linear function per component) and so composable without turning into an unmanageable dish of callback / future spaghetti.

There is a number of other VDOM libraries, but what sets React apart is the data / state flow strictly in one direction. This allows to reap many of the benefits of functional programming along the way, like everything the developer sees being immutable; not a coincidence.

Regarding the size, preact [1] is mostly API-compatible, but also absurdly small (3-4 kB minified), actually smaller than HTMX (10 kB). But with preact you likely also want preact-iso, so the size grows a little bit.

[1]: https://preactjs.com/

[strogonoff]

> implements efficient rendering on top of the DOM diff

Here your definition of React diverges from reality, I believe.

React does implement state management—it sort of has to to be of any use. It is a flavour of immediate mode GUI, and some way of managing what changes and what does not change between renders is necessary.

However, React famously does not know about DOM or even Web. (Unless you meant DOM in some more general sense?) People use React to make command-line interfaces, output to embedded LCD screens, etc.

Yes, coupling it to Web and DOM and abandoning the separation of concerns that makes core React so general-purpose could probably make React a bit smaller, but I think projects like Preact are welcome to do it instead.

[nine_k]

Makes sense: React itself is independent from a particular rendering method. There's react-dom that does the DOM rendering.

I was trying to point at the fact that rendering occurs on top of state management, as opposed to saying that "React is a rendering library".

[strogonoff]

You are right, and my calling it imGUI is a stretch since actually it does rely on state to know when to render.

If you think about it, the end goal is rendering, and React facilitates that, but the actual rendering (as in, changing page DOM, terminal buffer, etc.) happens outside of React. So my definition may need to be adjusted.

I still think it’s a stretch to call React a framework, though!

[mplewis]

React notoriously doesn't come with enough state management to properly manage state in anything larger than trivial.

[skinkestek]

I have yet to see a single case of any state management library actually improve state handling.

Lately I have started removing these libraries were possible and the maintainability has improved a lot.

Thankfully at my latest place there was no one when I came and I haven't seen a more productive team doing frontend.

[ricardobeat]

It always works nicely when things are small, but becomes extremely painful for large products or teams (100+).

[nine_k]

React comes with useState, useMemo, and useCallback, which is actually enough, but it may be too low-level when you think e.g. in terms of a huge interactive form. It's easy to write your own useWhatever based on these which would factor out your common boilerplate.

I suspect HTMX also does not come with every possible battery included, judging by the proliferation of libraries for HTMX-based projects. Modularity is a strength.

[agos]

it is enough in the sense that NAND gates are enough to build computers. Yes, you can write a complex application using only those, and yes it's easy to write hooks to keep the boilerplate low - although Context still feels like too much boilerplate - but as complexity grows it's quite natural to want to share state between distant parts of the application, and then you're left choosing between lifting staten and prop drilling (not great) or Context and massive, frequent rerenderings. Hence the need for third party state management solutions

[emseetech]

In reality though, making a case to use only the React library in a minimalist setup is just as hard to convince a team filled with people who came up in the past 10 years of front-end development as it is to convince them of using HTMX or web components. Nowadays, when people use React they use the whole kit-and-caboodle, and when they say React they mean all of it.

Personally, I avoid React because I don't want a compile step. I do everything I can to avoid one. And if I do need to use a framework like React, I prefer to isolate it to exactly where I need it instead of using it to build a whole site.

[strogonoff]

For the first part: yes, but that is why I think it is important to stress dependency vetting.

For the second part, a couple of times when I had to add a bit of purely client-side reactivity to something pre-existing but did not want to introduce any build step I simply aliased createElement() to el(). That said, personally I prefer TypeScript for a project of any size, so build step is implied and I can simply not think about converting JSX. Webpack triggers bad memories but esbuild is reasonable.

[emseetech]

FYI I use jsdoc for typing in my IDE so I get the benefit of types without the build step.

[strogonoff]

I like when it simply does not compile, which also helps if there are other various team members (or future me) who can not always be trusted to ignore typing errors. Also, I may be wrong, but I feel like JSDoc types are a bit limiting (and more verbose & extra effort) compared to inline TypeScript. Coming from Python, I really enjoy the typing power of TS and do not want to compromise on that…

[acdha]

Culturally, who writes React apps with only those dependencies? I’ve done it for quick benchmarks and the like, but actual sites almost always have a huge amount of code to load. It’s like saying that you can have a Java app using only builtin libraries: true in theory but rarely in practice.

I found this really noticeable while traveling over the summer with limited bandwidth: the sites which took 5 minutes to fail to load completely all used React or Angular along with many, many other things posturing at being an SPA but the fast sites were the classic server-side rendered PHP with a couple orders of magnitude less JavaScript. It really made me wonder about how we’ve gotten to the point where the “modern” web is basically unusable without a late-model iPhone and fast Wi-Fi or LTE even when you’re talking about a form with a dozen controls.

[withinboredom]

Most of the problem there are people implementing their own timeouts in javascript instead of relying on the browser. The browser knows the difference between something taking 5m and making no progress vs. something taking 5m and making slow progress. Your application does not.

[acdha]

In this case, it’s simply putting a mountain of code into the critical path. If you have to load 30MB before the page works, it’s just not going to be a good experience. You can try to handle and retry errors but it’s better not to get into that situation in the first place.

[withinboredom]

That's what I mean. I've seen async loaders that wait 5s and don't see the file, then request it again. Before you know it, you're downloading 50 files of the same file or making 100 api requests to the same api endpoint.