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Comment by Zetice | Hacker News Reader

I get so lost in these conversations, because I've been the lead on a relatively complex React app for literally years now and none of any of this has mattered or come up in any way whatsoever. Our app is plenty fast/responsive, maintenance hasn't been perfect but it's been manageable, same with new features... The learning curve around context was a bit steep but we get it now and haven't had any issues since.

It's like you're speaking a different language to me, and I find that so weird considering we're using the exact same framework. How am I not having any of these issues?

I'm honestly at the point where I wonder if y'all are making things harder on yourself somehow, because I could see how getting obsessed with counting every single re-render and trying to overoptimize would result in the stuff you're saying while not actually impacting perf in a meaningful way.

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I've been in the same boat with these discussions.

When I do encounter a component with countless re-renders as described, it is usually painfully obvious what causes them and easy enough to fix.

I think we're going too far if we're expecting React, or any framework, to be fool-proof to the point that we can just throw "whatever" we want at them and expect it to have peak performance.

Depends on what kind of so your building. For a while, a lot of the form libraries out there triggered huge numbers of rerenders and caused perf issues. That's still a problem, though some of it has gotten better uncontrolled components.

Timing-based UIs are (such as a sequence of triggered animations) can get really messy really fast. I've seen some really messy bugs in a app that had visuals and audio tied to different timers and user inputs in the app. We eventually moved all time-based animations to observables, which helped some

> a lot of the form libraries out there triggered huge numbers of rerenders and caused perf issues

Something I don’t quite get, doesn’t useRef just solve the re-render issue?

Sure, but then you're managing state and re-renders yourself. Kinda defeats the purpose of using the framework, right? The useRef() approach to fixing performance is the main reason why I think Signals are popping off. Users of frameworks like Vue and Svelte have felt this way for a long time.

I've worked on a form + animations based site ~2 years ago. Forms via higher-order functions, it was a full-stack NextJS thing. Without TS.

I had to eventually claw my eyes out and that solved part of my problems, at least I did not see the boilerplate and the ugliness.

Then soon after that we worked on a similar thing (form + draggable carousel with snap to grid animation) in Angular with Material.

And my conclusion is that whichever framework you pick, whatever libraries you end up using, you must have a strategy to allocate your time and maintenance budget, and many many many times the sane compromise is to write something in raw JS and encapsulate that in whatever the framework gives you, and move on. Don't try to solve it within the framework, because it's just not worth it.

Forms were annoying but `react-hook-forms` eliminated any random issues we had, and now forms are fine. Again, context saves the day here by letting me grab the form context within nested components to keep everything humming.

I don't know if we have any "timing" based components, though we manage global state using Apollo Client and again, haven't really had any issues with that.

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