[tow21]

On the plus side, maybe this means the endless churn of JS libraries will finally slow down and as someone who isn’t a JS developer but occasionally needs to dip their toe into the ecosystem, I can actually get stuff done without having to worry about 6-month old tutorials being wrong and getting caught in endless upgrade hell.

[grebc]

For what it’s worth - vanilla JS is pretty darn good and if you’re only dipping in for some small functionality I highly doubt a framework brings much benefit.

[jfengel]

I find vanilla JS unusable for anything bigger, though. It was designed for quickie scripts on throwaway web pages, but it's not great for anything you'd call a web app.

Typescript, however, does scale pretty well. But now you've added a compiler and bundler, and might as well use some framework.

[grebc]

Right tool for the right job.

I’ve written some pretty complicated vanilla JS and it works fine. I’m not dealing with other people crappy code however so YMMV.

[andrewl-hn]

Has this actually been true, though? I admit I don’t write JavaScript much recently, but to me it feels like things have pretty stabilized. React released hooks in early 2019 before Covid, and after that things don’t really change much at all.

At this point there are several large Rust UI libraries that try to replicate this pattern in web assembly, and they all had enough time to appear and mature without the underlying JSX+hooks model becoming outdated. To me it’s a clear sign that JS world slowed down.

[williamdclt]

> React released hooks in early 2019 before Covid, and after that things don’t really change much at all.

Server-side components became a thing, as well as the React compiler. And libraries in the React (and JS at large) ecosystem are pretty liberal with breaking changes, a few months is enough to have multiple libraries that are out-of-date and whose upgrade require handling different breaking changes.

React Native is it own pit of hell.

It did slow down a little since a few years ago, but it's still not great.

[xerox13ster]

Yes. When I dipped my toes into the front end ecosystem in 2021 to build a portfolio site, the month old tutorial video I followed, was already out of date. React had released an update to routers and I could not find any documentation on it. Googling for the router brought me to pages that said to do what I had done, which disagreed with the error message that I was getting from react.

React had just updated and documentation hadn’t.

I then discovered that Meta owns React so I got frustrated as hell with their obfuscation and ripped out all of the React and turned what was left into vanilla html+js.

[sesm]

React-router is it's own separate project not affiliated with Meta. React library doesn't ship a router.

[xerox13ster]

Yet at the time it seemed to need one. Glad I never looked back at that fragmented mess.

I also don’t ‘KTH-Trust’ Meta of all corporations to have a compile step for a web technology.