Comment by puelocesar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by puelocesar | Hacker News Reader

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> One of my pet peeves with the web development community is that so many of the decisions we make are vibes-based. ... All of this breathless boasting is usually offered with zero evidence

AI aside, this is something that bothered me a lot when I was forced to migrate from pure native mobile (swift) to React Native.

People would take the promotional talk of some SDK as truth without ever measuring and then being confused on why the whole app was slow (it CANNOT be XYZ, because XYZ developer says the are super fast!!)

Luckily my team was able to accept when I provided hard data (said framework was locking the JS thread for 200ms, sometimes a full second, for some operations, which rendered the all the UI laggy as hell).

> People would take the promotional talk of some SDK as truth without ever measuring and then being confused on why the whole app was slow

This has largely been my experience navigating the JS framework world from basically the beginning of React. It's wild how poorly some of the earliest presentations about React have aged, as that framework has gone through endless major API/design refactors.

Not to mention that benchmarks are a very flawed way to assess technology for builds with complex and open-ended requirements. If you're operating in a constrained environment and you have a clear bottleneck that a particular tool can solve, then benchmarks can be really helpful. But starting on a new product from 0 that needs flexibility to pivot does not necessarily benefit from picking the fastest tool in the shed.

React Native has always been so so terrible, I was convinced anyone who advocated for it had no taste or care for UX

In my experience:

Flutter good, React Native bad. (mobile)

In the time of LLM, Dart with its hermetically sealed environment and amazing tooling may be at a real advantage.

In the time of LLMS, just go native 100% of the time in my opinion.

I have the same feelings about React, so much so that I've never given it a second chance. Vue handles my use cases when it does, and when it doesn't it hasn't been because I needed _more_ in any way that React offers.

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