Comment by Flux159 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Flux159 | Hacker News Reader

Nice, it's an interesting concept and always like exploring new ways of using react in other contexts (react-three-fiber being easy to use for simple 3d projects, I have also written an Unreal Engine reconciler prototype earlier built on an Unreal JS plugin, but decided not to pursue it further).

Do you see the future of this project being something like a library of tscircuit components that you can compose together writing code rather than having to use Eagle or other pcb design software? Or I guess somehow autogenerating tscircuit components based on specsheets?

Looking at the code, I see that there's a reconciler here https://github.com/tscircuit/react-fiber/blob/main/src/lib/r..., but that seems to just be a thin wrapper to https://github.com/tscircuit/builder which is doing the heavy lifting of getting to a serializable format. One thing I'm wondering is why is there a need for separate repos since I feel like the tsx portion, reconciler, and builder are kinda needed together?

That's awesome to hear!! React Fiber is super cool and I love to see new stuff on it!

Yes I see the registry/central library being kind of like npm with a lot of React/tscircuit components that can be dropped into or used as a foundation for large designs, think <Arduino />, <MotorController /> or <Atmega /> etc. I also hope to make part substitution super easy, so equivalent subcircuits can be swapped based on part availability.

Separating into multiple repos makes some things really difficult but creates some nice boundaries. React Fiber is something that a lot of people don't understand (it's also not really officially documented as you may know!) so I wanted to separate it from "pure typescript" and the builder pattern which I think is a bit easier to grok if you're just fixing a bug etc. The codebases are a mess and I'm very eager to do some basic project hygiene- a lot of cruft accumulates over years of weekend development haha.

Thanks a ton for checking it out!!

This is really cool. As someone who knows enough to get something working, but nothing more, I've always dreamed of something like you're describing.

Yeah the reconciler docs were even worse when I was working with it, I had to ask the team to help with better docs or code pointers.

Makes sense to keep the boundaries between the different libs, but was just mentioning that single repo makes dev work much simpler from my experience (lib boundaries still enforceable with CI or tooling), but obviously there's a bunch of work to get that setup too so might not be super important at the moment.

Looking forward to see where this goes! Also, I think using an LLM to generate components from specs is an interesting idea as you mentioned in a different comment is a great idea to try out too.

I tried to use JSX syntax to generate PDF files. In the end I didn't go this way, but it was interesting idea, worth exploring.

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