Comment by samaltmanfried | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samaltmanfried | Hacker News Reader

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The situation with the tooling constantly changing isn't nearly as bad as the front-end frameworks themselves. I've been updating my knowledge of front-end, and it's an absolute shambles. The official React documentation(https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project) is telling me that in order to use their framework, I need to use another framework to solve (quote)"common problems such as code-splitting, routing, data fetching, and generating HTML"... At their suggestion I've picked NextJS, which is a "full-stack" React framework. This means that it has its own back-end which does most of the heavy lifting. So not only will our company have a traditional back-end, we'll also have a BFF (another thing the kids nowadays want), and a back-end that is actually our front-end application. At this point I've forgotten what problem we set out to solve.

NextJS' documentation is also *terrible*. This situation is made all the worse by any material online about NextJS that's more than 3 months old being totally inapplicable because the framework changes so often.

Nextjs is the trojan horse sent to destroy React and it worked

Is this how other people feel about NextJS? I've been trying to keep an open mind about it, but its entire design seems so antithetical to what I'm trying to accomplish. Is there a better mainstream alternative? From what I've seen NextJS is pretty commonly used.

The mainstream alternative is still to not have a "backend-for-the-frontend". If you use something like Rails, django, nodejs, use React connected to them. Or directly to something like supabase. NextJS is the extra complexity nobody needs.

It is marketed as the solution to slow starts but React is slow so the solution is terrible over-engineered.

A much better fix is to remove React and use something that is already fast like solidjs or Lit. There are much better UI Kits in Lit that I have seen in React and in the end it is just JS so the same people that can could React, can code Lit and SolidJS.

Thank you for the suggestions. Unfortunately, the only reason I'm writing React at all is because so many companies want React experience, and I figure I'd better stay up to date. If I was given the opportunity to choose technologies for myself all of the time, I'd steer clear of React at this point!

Yep, it’s terrible and everyone is going for it.

Next.js et al. provides a set of opinionated packages designed to enable a specific paradigm. For Next.js, that's server-side rendering. For Remix, that's progressive enhancement.

If you are happy with client-side rendering and do not desire React on the server, there is not a strong reason to use Next.js; it introduces complexity and churn.

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