[digitaltrees]

But why over vue? My biggest frustration has been how vue ends up moving in the direction of react. The original component architecture with the html template, JavaScript state and css styles in vue was so nice. Even the data fetching a url in the component was so intuitive.

[robocat]

A bit out of date, but I like the point-of-view of "The single most important factor that differentiates front-end frameworks" : https://mjswensen.com/blog/the-single-most-important-factor-...

[Lammy]

> A bit out of date

> article just about to turn three years old

JavaScript community never beating the allegations lol

[TonyStr]

I skimmed through it, and I think the only thing that is out of date is the section on `zone` in Angular. In october 2025, they changed to `zoneless` by default, which uses signals just like Vue. This was a long time coming imo, as the major criticism of Angular was how poorly update management was handled. Also Svelte runes aren't mentioned, as that came out three months after this post. Runes are essentially also signals.

Basically every framework now has a concept of * State - change this and the framework automatically updates UI and triggers effects * Effects - functions that run when parts of state change (or triggered by signals)

And almost everyone solves this with signals except for React.

[MrJohz]

The other thing out of date is Svelte using compile-time tracking — Svelte now also uses runtime tracking, i.e. signals.

At this point, I think React and Lit are the only major frameworks not using signals. And I'm not 100% sure about Lit.

[jameslol417]

Lit is pushing for signals too. https://lit.dev/docs/data/signals/

[threatofrain]

Any conversation which isn't dead will age fast in tech. What is the state of discussion on generating a random integer? Even that conversation advances.

[ahartmetz]

Fantastic article. It is strange that such important aspects of JS frameworks are so rarely discussed.

[jemmyw]

Great article. I prefer the react model over the other models. Now it'd be good to know, with every framework, which of these it implements.

[rao-v]

Terrific read thanks for digging it up

[patates]

I was deep in Vue 5-6 years ago, so much that I offered internal training for it and had sessions with more than 20 people attending.

IMHO, React wins because you can just treat templates as variables. You don't need "slots" or other special stuff. It's simply more composable.

[hajile]

Vue doesn't solve problems better than React (and solves them worse if you have to learn all their proprietary files and DSLs instead of JSX), so there's not much of a reason to switch.

The real discussion would be between React's vdom and something like Solid's signals.

[lwansbrough]

It does, if you care about ergonomics. The reactivity model is simpler and arguably less error prone.

It does have its own templating syntax, which is trivial to learn. No more cumbersome to learn than JSX, which is a templating language designed by the React team. Not sure why you chose to make the distinction between JSX and Vue’s DSL as if JSX wasn’t developed for the sole purpose of facilitating React’s virtual DOM.

[hajile]

JSX is <div>abc</div> turns into createElement('div', null, 'abc') and you can use that instead of JSX if you like or you can use something like hyperscript. Everything else like mapping or if statements is pure JS and works just like JS anywhere else in your app.

Vue templates mean learning Vue's custom syntax for if statements, loops, dynamic attribute syntax (with its own gotcha), binding dot modifiers, data binding, and whatever else. It requires learning its entire custom directive system. It uses custom syntax for stuff like events too.

I don't see this as remotely comparable with Vue being much closer to something like my time working with Angular 1 (a time I'd rather not repeat).

[lwansbrough]

It’s a distinction without a difference. Both need to be transpiled, what happens under the hood is of little concern to anyone.

Please explain React’s reactive data binding since it’s apparently much simpler than v-model=

;)

[incrudible]

It is a massive difference. I do not like magic compilers. The JSX transform is trivial and not even necessary, just create a factory function and React.createElement becomes arguably more readable, just not HTML like.

[lwansbrough]

Is it a massive difference, or is it a small difference? At the end of the day 99% of React projects have a transpilation step and utilize some form of “magic compiler” somewhere along the line.

The simplicity of JSX is overvalued. It just means more code, and typically uglier code, to achieve the same behaviour as Vue. Which is basically the theme of React when you compare the two libraries.

[satvikpendem]

It was explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274077#48275389

[Semaphor]

Vue supports JSX, though to be fair, it’s not idiomatic and hence never shows up in any docs.

[cyanydeez]

thankfull. i find reading JSX A visible eyesore, like an LLM reached its comtext length and just snorted blood and bile out its nose

[Semaphor]

I don't like it either, though I have less of a visceral reaction ;)

[snemvalts]

JSX is a very thin layer of templating logic inside JS. Meaning you have all the language features available while templating. Some arbitrary JS can result in templating.

Vue's DSL is whatever language the developer implemented. Which is probably not enough, depends how much effort they put into it and how good they are in language design. Given that they cargo cult HTML tags to organize components in a pseudo-familiar but not-valid-HTML way, I don't have much confidence in their language design skills.

I'd take the former any day.

[Lukas_Skywalker]

While I understand the advantage of using the built-in language features (and I know why it is required to be done that way), I still think using

    {enable && <Form />}

for conditional rendering, or

    {collection.map(x => <Item x={x} /> }

for looping are not the most obvious choices. If you ask people how conditionals and loops are written in JS, you will get 'if' and 'for' or variants of 'while'. So I get where the v-if and v-for are coming from.

[MarsIronPI]

Me personally, I prefer these more functional (and more succinct) expressions. For loops are overly verbose, and not as composable. But then again, I'm a Lisp programmer.

[snemvalts]

Let's say you to render conditionally when `x` is present. You do `v-if="x"`. Now you want to refer to `x.y.z` in the body, while `y` is optional.

Can you be sure that the value is present? How do you check for it? What does Vue need to do to enable this functionality with static type checking with TypeScript?

With `{x && <>{x.y.z}</>}`, it's almost vanilla TS, it's the same as `x && x.y.z` in normal TS. Type narrowings that work in TS are guaranteed to work in React, without the framework having to do anything.

Less framework/library code required to make the same thing work. To me, that's the sign of a better abstraction and implementation.

[digitaltrees]

Sorry but JS is, and always has been, a crap language many are trying to escape. So saying react has the full power of JavaScript is an antipatten as far as I am concerned. Vue is better designed.

[mmis1000]

Vue solve single source of truth much better than react though. The shape of derived data and source data (or even external data) are the same and interchangeable. So you can write an api that works with both without handling implementation quirks at all.

The words borrowed from someone else:

The react is more about view.

The vue is more about reactivity

[lthi747]

So JSX is not proprietary?

[onion2k]

The company I work for uses Vue. I think the non-backwards-compatible move from Vue 2 to Vue 3 burned a lot of the current devs, so now they're stuck working on Vue 2 apps that are in maintenance mode with no viable case to clean up the mess by moving everything to Vue 3. The experiments to do it with Copilot mostly failed, although that was in the early days so another try today might work better. If we're doing something drastic to improve though, we might as well solve our "Vue devs are hard to find" problem by rebuilding it all in React at the same time.

[Ronsenshi]

I am in a process of upgrading fairly big Vue 2 app (technically 2 apps, where one is not traditional and the other uses Inertia) to Vue 3.

It is a fairly painful process - I am using Codex and Claude as a first pass for converting things, but everything has to be checked manually and often fixed or rolled back to try again. Too often instead of "removing" piece of code that is not necessary anymore, AI would try to add a 100 line workaround for it because it would really rather add things than remove them.

It is, however still a faster process than doing manual rewrite. Smaller components are a breeze to convert from older Vue 2 to Vue 3 composition API.

Rewriting entry point app.ts with bunch of custom plugins was a horrendous experience that eventually was done manually. Move from Vuex to Pinia was also 50/50. Some things were easy, some things were not and had to be done manually.

Then there's a process of switching from unsupported packages which is a whole other can of worms.

Overall - if not for AI I'm not sure I'd have gone with an upgrade at this point. Yes it requires careful review and testing, but a ton of trivial stuff was done very quickly.

[gbuk2013]

I led a project to (successfully) migrate a Vue 2 to 3 app and while that was painful and expensive, I still find Vue more pleasant to work with than React once it was done. But TBH depending one team code discipline either could be fine or a nightmare. :)

[lwansbrough]

I definitely sympathize with the feelings about the Composition API. Though I’ve moved past it because looking at React’s visible complexity (useMemo, useEffect - which apparently have changed names again since I last looked) - Vue has clearly chosen a superior API design.

[stefanfisk]

Unless I’m completely missing something, those hooks still have the same names and semantics as always?

[lwansbrough]

Yeah you’re actually right I was looking at the API section instead of the Hooks section. Perhaps another demonstration of React’s verbose API surface.

[synergy20]

I'm using Vue and do not feel it's becoming react

[lwansbrough]

This sentiment only really applies if you’re coming from Vue 1/2 to Vue 3. The Composition API is definitely more like React but makes some better design decisions that make it easier to work with than React. Such as implicit reactivity.

[9dev]

If anything, composition API has taken the good parts from React. Once you get the hang of it, it’s amazing. Everything clicks together, is easily composable, and fully typed-safe.

[sevenzero]

Yup I'd sign this. We use Vue2 in a old codebase with options API and composition API in new projects. Both feel way better than anything I ever had to do with React (how many Hooks do you have to learn by now? 13?)

Vue just has a very simple lifecycle and combined with a simple store like Pinia it's just really fun to work with.

[geon]

Is Vue still magic, or can you actually write normal typescript?

[cyanydeez]

as long as JSX never becomes default in Vue, vue is still winning

[AbraKdabra]

Amen.