I dislike the constant churn of React and other libraries, that often add change for change's sake, and break backwards compatibility or depend on too many libraries. At the same time Elm is maybe too much in the other direction.
Elm could have server side rendering too, like nextjs. That is IMO way worse.
Ports are needed because they make any js code go through the same "even router" than any Elm code. It works very well. Without ports js would break the guarantees that Elm provides. It is quite an elegant solution.
The only problem is if you wanted to call something requiring very high performance, like an event loop in a game, then going through a port call on every frame would probably be too slow. Even in that case you could write a bigger chunk outside of elm and call it from elm, and it would be ok. Please note that this problem happens with any?/most? FFI implementations in any language.
P.S. React does not prohibit anything. They just shame you into it not being best practices :)
And got me thinking, in a world where anybody can fork a project, and tweak it, how does a language keep a solid base to work from. And it does seem like it is those with corporate backing.
I'm not against it. I'm a big fan of F#.
But kind of sad that ELM isn't making it, since, in my opinion the ELM architecture is great concept for functional languages to do GUI's.
I rant about this because I actually really enjoyed programming in Elm when I tried it out. But this shortsightedness has basically killed it. Had they been more lax with native modules and more community oriented, the language would be much bigger now.
Alas, it is what it is.
https://noredink.com/about/team
> where Richard Feldman is CTO
The router situation has always been a mess too, and passing props around and lately contexts also overlap and have changed with time.
Some of building blocks seem to have been built organically, without regards for backwards compatibility. It is still very useful (I happily use react and next js) but the concepts are not very elegant and internally consistent IMHO.