[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+).

[strogonoff]

Which always seemed a bit ironic, considering those libraries are presumably intended to make state management work better if you really have to do a lot of it (i.e., have a large product).

[nine_k]

At MPOW we have a bunch of state-managing components for complex cases, like multi-page forms or API-backed grids with tons of filters, etc. They take some effort to get the hang of them, but after that they save large amounts of boilerplate.

[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

[strogonoff]

Are you sure contexts causing rerenders is not solvable by moving useContext() calls into hooks that each return only the part of the context that is required and ensure reference equality of returned value (meaning any component will not have a reason to rerender unless there is an actual change in that part of the context)?

[nine_k]

Also, should not memo [1] suffice?

[1]: https://react.dev/reference/react/memo

[agos]

honestly, I'm not sure.

This is my main complaint about React - the "just don't worry about rerenders!" model works well until it really does not, but then you're left with very little help from the tooling to understand and fix it: "why did this render happen" is still a surprisingly difficult question to answer, and if you really want to take control of this you have to very carefully micro manage useCallbacks, useMemos, memo(), probably lie about your useEffect dependencies, check every single hook, and hope that your dependencies do the same. In the words of Ben Lesh[1]: React is not a pit of success.

That said, I fear your solution would not work - your usePartOfTheContext() would re-render every time the useContext() inside did, not helping with avoiding re-renders. But if you only passed the part of context to descendants that use memo(), it _should_ work. Having children of context providers always use memo() is probably a good rule of thumb.

This uncertainty is why I find it much more productive to just slap shared state inside Jotai, so I can be reasonably certain that rerenders will have the smallest granularity without any more work.

I am very hopeful about the compiler, which should help a lot with this, freeing a lot of mental bandwidth, but also useEffectEvent() which will finally make useEffect sane.

[1]: https://x.com/BenLesh/status/1845638051424587879 worth opening for the meme in the quoted tweet

[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…

[emseetech]

I prefer to just run tsc to check for type errors on GitHub commits instead of needing them for every change.

And yeah inline types are more verbose but I prefer to use .d.ts files for definitions and then declare with a comment (vim lets me move to definitions with ctrl-] which is nice).

I also come from a Go background so I actively don't like using the more esoteric and complex types that typescript provides.