Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

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I recommend avoiding React. I have never seen an ecosystem so bogged down at every turn.

It's perfectly possible to just use React on its own, without getting bogged down with all the other buzzword-of-the-week stuff around it.

React itself has been reasonably stable for a long time in Web terms. It is much more tightly scoped and smaller in its interface than most JS frameworks. There are a couple of major design trade-offs, which often seem to get overlooked in React advocacy, but if you have a bit of experience using it and understand the practical pros and cons then you can quickly decide whether the balance is favourable for some new project.

People who work in React spend way more time fixing toolchain stuff and trying to mix 10 artisanal-crafted "easy to reason about" libraries in order to accomplish tasks which are either solved or not even issues in other component frameworks.

Some people who work with React might. Plenty of others don't.

React is great. But the tooling around it tends to complicate things a lot. Just for example react-redux (not just redux).

When I first started with React, it felt awesome - just React still feels great. But I had just started then and then got introduced to redux (I had been using something similar custom built). That was good too, until I learnt react-redux. I get the concepts, I understand every bit of it and have used it correctly in many large apps - it is useful. But react-redux just feels awkward many times and I consistently feel something is wrong with it - but I don't know what. React-Redux just feels disconnected with the idea of independent web-components.

On a side note - If one is okay moving to Typescript, Angular2 is just amazing.

I find the Redux ecosystem to be one of those areas that sounds great in theory, but that in practice has quite a narrow range where it's a good fit. If the web app's data model is simple enough, it can easily keep track of mutable state directly and just rerender everything on any relevant change with acceptable performance. If the model is complicated enough, the simple data stores provided by Redux and the like lack power and flexibility until you build a lot of other architecture around them, at which point you might well be better off building something catering to your project's exact needs anyway. I can see that there might be a happy zone somewhere in between, where building with tools like Redux and its surrounding ecosystem does pay off, but I've yet to work on such a project myself.

Would you like to try Respo https://github.com/respo-mvc/respo/wiki/Quick-Start if you hold similar options with me? I built Respo because I think React is not functional enough.

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