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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

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andrewstuart

>> react literally cannot handle the quantities of data

Presented at fact but I’m not sure this is universally correct.

I don’t see why the application that is linked here couldn’t be done in react.

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The application linked here is only showing 270 cells at once. I think even the slowest framework can handle that...

It's when you get to thousands/tens of thousands of data points that things can really slow down without good optimizations, especially if you're modifying the DOM or manipulating SVGs (as opposed to drawing to Canvas, typically).

But isn't that exactly the point of such UI libraries? To provide those optimizations. Because the easy case, I can do myself.

Yes...? I think maybe there are some threads getting mixed up here? There are some sibling/cousin threads discussing performance more in depth. My post you replied to is just pointing out that 300 cells isn't really enough to measure any sort of meaningful performance.

Then, there was a mixup.

Removed the word "literally" (riffed too enthusiastically there) because my point was that's its already a bit slow, will only get slower as more things are added, and the code is already ugly despite being basically conventional/boring react.

The data I'm displaying also is quite deep and results in the creation of a lot of DOM elements (i.e. its visual rather than tabular). It noticeably chugs a bit even when the actual changes to be displayed are relatively small.

Yep not true at all lol. I’ve built extremely complex UIs with react with solid performance. Just need to know react better, I guess.

Would you say all that useMemo (et al) was a productive use of your time? One of the things I like about svelte is that it seems to encourage code to be naturally fast rather than deal with a load of abstraction leakage (very productive abstraction leakage, but still) everywhere

Dan Abramov's favourite UI is apparently spotify, I think it shows in the things react seems to be designed for.

I dropped the word "literally" from my original comment as I didn't think before I wrote (classic), now I think it's a fair comment.

I was using mobx at the time. It was a very complex app UI with lots of data and streams. This was like 4+ years ago.

I mean I don’t personally care about the semantics that much as much as the business results. The commenter said react isn’t a good choice and that was my disagreement.

And Spotify isn’t exactly a “tough” UI compared to something data intensive.

The main reason why I want to stop using react is actually precisely that I feel massively distracted from delivering business value when using it (although still better off than without it entirely obviously). JSX is quite fantastic for some things but I have found it to be fairly annoying when it comes to laying out data that has a very clear pattern to it (personally not a huge fan of functional style here)

As for spotify, that was also the point I was trying to make i.e. React was made so facebook can ~~poison the minds of the youth~~ help people share stories, Svelte being made by someone who did dataviz for NYT really shows.

Should say at this point that despite my love of Svelte in principal I still would actually probably build an app that used a react-like framework to glue svelte components together as I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the aspects of svelte that have scope wider than a component.

I also like svelte. I’ve not used it for anything serious yet though for one reason: lack of libraries.

What you describe is a valid concern. I like keeping it more “vanilla” with svelte but any time I run into an issue of “Do I spend the next 2 hours building this, or just vet and pull in a library?” I’m left with the former option.

At this point in my life I’m not that interested in spending more time than I have to get something done.

So.. I just use react. No customer cares about 35kb vs 8kb or whatever people seem to optimize for. Even businesses in a developing country have 50-100mbps connection, and honestly most customers (even tech corps) don’t care about this stuff.

You can use any vanilla HTML/css/js libraries with Svelte, and those far outnumber React’s.

React can handle dense interfaces with a lot of elements but you have to be very careful with memoization and it's extremely easy to accidentally introduce significant performance regressions if something in your memoization chain breaks.

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