[overstay8930]

Watching Meta rewrite Messenger twice without success was enough for me to never touch React for any large project, especially after that botched e2ee chat rollout.

[cwalv]

You think the major complicating factor of rolling out e2ee was that they used react?

[overstay8930]

Given I was able to see the errors directly in the js console, yes. You used to be able to break everyone's state by putting an emoji in a URL.

[fsociety]

I was hoping for stronger rationale than this. This is not a React-specific problem.

[overstay8930]

Of course it's not a "react problem". It's a skill issue created by the reality that React is incredibly difficult to scale in large projects.

If Meta cannot even handle React, what hope is there for the rest of us?

[gejose]

You really think Messenger isn't successful? You think any issues Messenger had was because of react?

Do you have sources on this?

[overstay8930]

I didn't say Messenger wasn't successful. I said that Meta rewrote Messenger twice and did not meet their internal goals both times.

Even today you can see Messenger completely break down if you have to sync for more than ~30 seconds. JS console fills up with errors about your broken state as you start to lose messages. Local storage is out of sync, session state breaks, and it's all right there in the console. It's been like this for years on WebKit. React just has too many bugs for a complex behemoth like Messenger.

React Native is just as bad and basically everyone I know in real life can corroborate lost messages, broken group chats, horrible photo experiences, and memory leaks!

You can just look at Messenger vs WhatsApp and the difference is just night and day in the user experience. The e2ee backends are the same (according to my pcaps, I could be lying), it's purely the front end that changes - and you won't find anyone that says Messenger is better than WhatsApp.