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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

MVC is unidirectional.

Nope, not between views. View triggers controller, updates model, triggers some random set of views to update, which triggers controllers, which triggers other models, etc. There is no hierarchy there, nor any batching to avoid rendering inconsistent intermediate state. You have no control of how an update affects your UI.

With React, data flows down from the top of the component hierarchy, always. And it doesn't render until all state changes have been made, so you only render after your data has reached consistency.

Incorrect. In fact, you can use React as the 'V' in MVC. That's how it was orignally designed. See here: https://github.com/facebook/react/tree/015833e5942ce55cf31ae...

I am done with this thread.

One of my complaints about reading computer science and/or programming books in the early 2000(or late 1990s?) was the contradictory definitions of MVC in books I read at the time. I think one book even indicated that MVVM(I think) was often referred to as MVC as an explanation for why this happened. So it understandable people still have conflicting definitions.

Here is a random example[1] I pulled up of someone one thinking MVC is not unidirectional but MVVM is. I am not commenting on the correctness of this impression.

> MVVM is better than MVC/MVP because of its unidirectional data and dependency flow. Dependency is one way,...

[1] https://dev.to/vtsen/mvc-vs-mvp-vs-mvvm-design-patterns-443n....

That's not what we're talking about at all, and you've lost the plot. The reason why React has won out for over a decade is because of the abject failure of MVC to materialize its benefits. It just doesn't scale.

What about it doesn't scale? Most UI frameworks, including ASP.NET Core, JSP and JSF (Java based frameworks), Ruby on Rails, and Django (Python) are all based on MVC. If MVC doesn't scale the folks who maintain those frameworks would have noticed by now.

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