Comment by Ralfp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ralfp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I am sorry but this sounds like Dunning-Kruger effect on your part. You have created library that you think the problem, but which seems to have limited adoption in the wild. What experience in the field you have? Have you wondered how much you don't know about problems and scenarios that view layer has to handle?

I've been in same situation once with my OS project. I've did something small that I've been certain does what all those other heavier solutions do. But when users came I've learned that there's unimaginable number of edge cases and scenarios that are common enough to require annoying amount of work.

React.js is not "DOM utility". Its battletested view library running one of busiest social sites in the world. It's highly performant, capable of handling thousands of components at single time, and handles countless edge cases, like maintaining input state while user is typing in it and its moved around DOM, normalizing events between browsers, maintaining scroll between large redraws or jumping user to components #fragment.

Ember.js and Angular are complete app frameworks that implement view, layers, services, data, communications testing, tooling and more. Those are solid options for people writing dashboard applications (think intercom or Podio), even if they are losing ground in public-facing sites to more elastic stacks like React or Vue.

This is by the way, a thinly veiled insult. Citing Dunning-Kruger effect is just a way to call someone an idiot who thinks they are competent.

Nobody looks at objective benchmarks. My own DOM utility is faster than React.js, and in fact it is not such a difficult feat, there are a few DOM utilities which are faster, also authored by relative nobodies.

I don't worry about catering to IE8 users, neither do most websites, and that number is vanishingly small. I'm also not interested in competing on complexity, which is what happens when one preemptively builds for edge cases.

I will probably never work on a web app that has a wider reach than Facebook. Setting up arbitrary personal goals for success like working on "one of the busiest social sites in the world" and even achieving that won't make me any happier. How much is enough? I've already proven that I beat Facebook at the DOM performance game, and still I'm the Dunning-Kruger idiot.

But React is bloated. Check it out in comparison to something like Mithril which does everything it does and more in a much smaller and faster package.

Last time I've checked Mithril it had no event normalization, JSX, scroll control and input state preservation. Does it have those now?

I've did Mithril for 6 months year an half ago, before that Ember.js for two years and Angular.js for year even before that. I've eventually settled with React.js because it was just view library, with everything else up to you.

You can compile JSX to hyperscript.

https://mithril.js.org/jsx.html

I've never needed any of the others, not sure.

JSX and input state preservation were already there a year and a half ago when you were using Mithril. It does not automatically normalize events, though I'm not sure how important that is in 2017. I don't know what you mean by scroll control.

I've done very little marketing, and I am effectively a nobody without a huge following or elite credentials unlike some of the people behind the most popular frameworks. It would be completely unfair to judge me based on popularity and making negative assumptions about my experience, rather than merit.

In fact I refuse to market my pet project as if it is something to be bought and sold. or to assign it a valuation based on how many big companies are using it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com