Comment by knoebber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knoebber | Hacker News Reader

I spent about 2 years at my last job building a greenfield react app mostly by myself (around 10k sloc). I enjoyed it for the most part. But I did run into all the issues raised here, they are valid. I think the worst issue with React is the dependency arrays that get sprinkled around everywhere - in my opinion the framework is unusable without a 3rd party linting tool that points out when your dependency array is missing something. If you accidentally add the wrong value in there, hello infinite render loop!

One of the biggest level ups I had was extracting complex hooks into their own .js files instead of stuffing next to component code. This helps a lot with readability/reusability.

Overall I liked what I came up with, but it felt like a lot of inventing stuff on my own, which I'm not sure if the next developer who comes along will appreciate.

I think a lot of the problems the author highlighted become more apparent as the number of devs in the codebase goes up.

If one member doesn't understand all of the nuances of useEffect or paint useCallback, they can write a component or custom hook that another team uses and gets subtle bugs from.

For example, I need to look inside of a hook to see whether the callback it provided was wrapped in useCallback. That means I can't truly rely on the abstraction since I need to learn it's internals.

I don’t know of any language or framework that guards from mangling a buggy abstraction and then exposing an interface for it.

Pretty much this. I've owned entire applications and it's really fun when you're working alone. But adding a new developer that does not grok hooks (mostly because they are more use to imperative patterns than functional ones), and you will have bugs to deal with almost every single day. In a project, I was using Firebase as the backend and hooks allowed me to nicely abstract it away and use a language closer to business domain (like `useEntity(entityId)` and `useCreateEntity(entityData)`). Everything was more modular from changing the backend layer to breaking up bigger components.

> hello infinite render loop!

What's funny to me about this is that React people expressed so much hatred for Angular 1 for its "digest loop" and the difficulty of debugging infinite digest loops. And here we are, difficult to debug infinite digest loops in React that don't even give you the courtesy of raising an error after too many iterations.

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