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Comment by MartijnHols | Hacker News Reader

There is no such things as a true apples to apples comparison for libraries such as this. They all cherry pick something and ignore a ton of things such as:

  - accessibility
  - amount of libraries with plug-and-play solutions to common problems
  - security
  - scalability
  - rendering performance
  - maintainability
  - browser support
  - browser extension interference
  - hundreds of other niche edge-cases that someone will eventually run into but are non-obvious until it's widely used

React is really well-thought out and well made by hundreds of professional contributors that have worked on it for years. The premise that hobbyists can make a better overall solution in less than 8 months is strange. At best they can make a smaller solution, but it will have to sacrifice in other areas.

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React and the react ecosystem fail at many of the criteria you’ve listed. You might argue “that’s not reacts fault” but when I look at a website that takes 15+ seconds to load its content on a gigabit connection , I’m never surprised when it’s react. Lots of sites have massive issues with rendering performance, scalability and maintainability even with react.

What react does do is give you a clean separation of concerns across team boundaries and allow for reusable components . But the cost you pay for that is a boat load of overhead, complexity, maintainability concerns, and react specific edge cases

A 15+ second load on a gigabit connection is impossible to have anything to do with the React library, as React is only kilobytes big and has no impact on the host.

It’s not just about the size of the payload, it’s about the stuff happening in the background and the constant diffing of the various DOMs that react has. I can tell I’m on a react site by how laggy it is. Some devs manage to do better but I can still tell.

Another wonderful feature of react is it will fully render the page on my iPad and then quickly replace it with an error message. Absolute brilliance.

> You might argue “that’s not reacts fault” but when I look at a website that takes 15+ seconds to load its content on a gigabit connection , I’m never surprised when it’s react.

> A 15+ second load on a gigabit connection is impossible to have anything to do with the React library, as React is only kilobytes big and has no impact on the host.

Perfectly proving my point.

It's not react-the-framework's fault, yet those sites are always react sites.

This is the "everyone who drinks water dies, therefore drinking water is deadly" argument. I'd also guess lesser known frameworks have a higher proportion of better developers - i.e people taking the time to research and try new technologies probably are more competent. You're also forgetting about the trillions of wordpress (and similar) websites that exist.

It’s really not.

It’s much more of a “everyone who chooses this flavor of soda dies”. Maybe it’s the soda, maybe it’s the people it attracts.

> I'd also guess lesser known frameworks have a higher proportion of better developers - i.e people taking the time to research and try new technologies probably are more competent.

And this is the “you’re holding it wrong” argument.

Facebook and Airbnb are the poster children for react (one of them wrote react). They are both perfect examples of absolutely disastrously monsters of websites plagued with issues related to all of the problems react supposedly solved.

So what stack are you using with React?

Depends on the project. For websites I like to use a statically generated Nextjs site served by nginx[1] and for SPAs Nginx that serves a Vite-built static bundle with a backend that’s in whatever language the backend team chose.

[1] https://martijnhols.nl/blog/how-much-traffic-can-a-pre-rende...

You didn't ask me, but I have what seems like an esoteric use for React: I only use React for the components, because vanilla/native web components are a major pain in the ass to work with.

You don’t need to wrestle with React’s state management monster unless you’re into that sort of thing.

I think companies should make web developers use a decade-old bargain-basement laptop at least once a month.

Each team member could take their turn using it so that it's already tooled up for the project they are working on.

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