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The Business Case for Vanilla JavaScript

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250430.html
6•LAC-Tech•1y ago

Comments

copypaper•1y ago
I would personally never touch a frontend not written with a framework. Sounds like a terrible developer experience--especially with a team. But from reading your article, it sounds like your issue is with React itself. I would recommend you try Svelte, it sounds like what you're looking for. It's as close to vanilla js as you can get with all the benefits of a framework.
LAC-Tech•1y ago
What benefits of a framework?

I think that's why I wrote this - I almost completely fail to see them.

proc0•1y ago
I think React caved in to wider adoption pressure to introduce abstractions that are intuitive on the surface level but are costly in terms of large scale complexity.

> It's "declarative" right up until you're debugging stateful hooks, or resorting to useRef, or trying to reason about when a "component" re-renders

Maybe they should have modularized the core library more and have these things be separate, because the core idea of a uniflow pattern with reactivity is good.

I think what happened, at least in frontend, is that the industry pushed away from having engineers do any design or architecting on the frontend. All of these high level patterns have been "outsourced" to frameworks, and the result usually is something that has trouble scaling and adjusting to whatever domain it's in.

LAC-Tech•1y ago
Maybe they should have modularized the core library more and have these things be separate, because the core idea of a uniflow pattern with reactivity is good.

That's what SolidJS does. IE the signal implementation is completely stand alone. I feel like it's better at doing what react purports to do then react is.

* think what happened, at least in frontend, is that the industry pushed away from having engineers do any design or architecting on the frontend. All of these high level patterns have been "outsourced" to frameworks*

I don't think react patterns are particularly high level, or do they save you from architecture. Whether it's vanilla JS or react, you still have to design.

proc0•12mo ago
Oh I haven't looked at Solidjs yet, interesting will take a look. And yeah you may still need to design your application, but having hooks be something that is out-of-the-box pushes you into certain patterns and needs to be actively ignored to avoid its design influence. I've worked in large codebases where they make almost everything into hooks, and they start getting ridiculous, breaking composability but at the same time giving the illusion that you are making your code more modular.
GianFabien•1y ago
I write web front-ends for industrial embedded systems. So my experience might differ from business WebApps.

In my experience it requires a longer learning curve for the various frameworks than to simply learn the relevant Web API. My learning is very much JIT and over time I have built up a robust class library that gets my stuff done. When I get stuck ChatGPT suggests fixes that sometimes work and spare me from losing more hair.

LAC-Tech•1y ago
My experience too - part of what I found is how much about how react worked I'd forgotten. But the browser itself was easier to pick up.

Rooting My IoT Stand Mixer

https://bensimms.moe/rooting-my-iot-stand-mixer/
1•skadamat•49s ago•0 comments

SpecD – spec-driven development workflow for AI coding agents

https://github.com/specd-sdd/SpecD
1•lsmonki•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Trent – Contextual architectural security reviews inside Claude Code

https://trent.ai/solutions/claude-code-security/
1•enothereska•2m ago•0 comments

I Won't Build Your Website in WordPress (and What I Recommend Instead)

https://arnold.gamboa.ph/why-i-wont-build-your-website-in-wordpress-and-what-i-recommend-instead/
1•speckx•2m ago•0 comments

Product-Shaped or Movement-Shaped?

https://werd.io/product-shaped-or-movement-shaped/
1•benwerd•4m ago•0 comments

The UAE doubles down on Israel and America

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/04/30/the-uae-doubles-down-on-israel-and-america
1•andsoitis•4m ago•0 comments

GTM Jobs of the Week

https://gtmjobs.beehiiv.com/p/gtm-engineer-jobs-week-of-april-17-2026
1•benchmarkapp•5m ago•0 comments

The architecture of Agentic Commerce: protocols vs. browser-based agents

https://www.cartai.ai/blog/every-ai-recommendation-is-a-transaction-waiting-to-happen
1•maniluppal•5m ago•1 comments

Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?

https://distr.sh/blog/running-docker-in-production/
1•pmig•7m ago•0 comments

WMF Secured Govt. Commitment Ahead of Administrative Registration in Indonesia

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/04/30/wikimedia-foundation-secured-governments-commitment-to-user...
1•exploraz•7m ago•1 comments

A local-first proxy and trace viewer for MCP servers

https://github.com/vnmoorthy/mcpobservatory
1•vnmoorthy•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: "Be horse." – a diffusion language model on an M2 Air

https://boesch.dev/posts/simple-dlm/
4•encrux•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DD Photos – static photo albums, now with Docker and 1-command deploy

https://ddphotos.donohoe.info
1•dougdonohoe•10m ago•0 comments

CHERI memory safety mitigates LLM-discovered vulnerability in FreeBSD

https://cheri-alliance.org/cheri-memory-safety-mitigates-llm-discovered-vulnerability-in-freebsd/
1•kwitaszczyk•11m ago•0 comments

I Built a WebAssembly Runtime in 5 Days

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Watercolor World with Three.js

https://susurrus.vercel.app/
2•lovegrenoble•11m ago•1 comments

Auk Mini 2

https://www.auk.com/products/auk-mini-2
1•punnerud•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Easily share single-file HTML pages and see what others have built

https://www.siteseeing.io/explore
1•paul_brook•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: New Harness in Town

https://github.com/1jehuang/jcode
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Show HN: Pollen – distributed WASM runtime, no control plane, single binary

https://github.com/sambigeara/pollen
5•sambigeara•13m ago•1 comments

The Science Behind Honey's Eternal Shelf Life (2013)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-behind-honeys-eternal-shelf-life-1218690/
1•downbad_•13m ago•1 comments

Dedupe TV episodes by quality. Keep best, delete worse and sidecars

https://github.com/asm0dey/dedupe-episodes
1•asm0dey•14m ago•0 comments

Copy Fail: 732 Bytes to Root on Every Major Linux Distribution

https://xint.io/blog/copy-fail-linux-distributions
1•samaysharma•15m ago•0 comments

My Calculator Is a Transformer

https://sinclairs.gitlab.io/blog/my-calculator-is-a-transformer/
2•radarsat1•15m ago•1 comments

Why isn't the fundamental theorem of arithmetic obvious? (2011)

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/why-isnt-the-fundamental-theorem-of-arithmetic-obvious/
1•downbad_•15m ago•1 comments

OpenVerb – offline voice dictation for macOS using one model instead of two

https://github.com/Terobyte/OpenVerb
2•terobyte•16m ago•0 comments

Florida possums with GPS collars used to track pythons in Everglades

https://www.tcpalm.com/story/news/local/florida/2026/04/28/florida-burmese-pythons-track-everglad...
1•bookmtn•17m ago•0 comments

My Agent Management Software

https://tybug.dev/plait/
3•spooneybarger•17m ago•0 comments

A Friday Side Project Became a Graph Query Language

https://systay.github.io/posts/2026-04-30-i-just-wanted-a-query-planner/
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A Licensure Framework for Autonomous Clinical AI

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2848378?guestAccessKey=ccdd68a8-12c4-42b4-bd7b-...
2•brandonb•20m ago•0 comments