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The Business Case for Vanilla JavaScript

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250430.html
6•LAC-Tech•11mo ago

Comments

copypaper•11mo 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•11mo ago
What benefits of a framework?

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

proc0•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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.

AV1's open, royalty-free promise in question as Dolby sues Snapchat over codec

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-free-promise-in-question-as-dolby-sues-...
1•pjmlp•1m ago•0 comments

Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-chil...
3•ndr42•4m ago•0 comments

My heuristics are wrong. What now?

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03/20/ic-leadership.html
2•r4um•5m ago•0 comments

Office Chair Is $50 Cheaper Than We've Seen Before

https://www.wired.com/story/branch-ergonomic-chair-pro-amazon-spring-sale-2026/
2•joozio•14m ago•0 comments

CERN uses tiny AI models burned into silicon for real-time LHC data filtering

https://theopenreader.org/Journalism:CERN_Uses_Tiny_AI_Models_Burned_into_Silicon_for_Real-Time_L...
5•TORcicada•16m ago•0 comments

Open Source Gave Me Everything Until I Had Nothing Left to Give

https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-18-open_source_gave_me_everything_until_i_had_nothing_lef...
4•ta988•17m ago•0 comments

Mysterious Trading Patterns Follow Trump into War

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/25/trump-iran-oil-insider-trading
2•karakoram•19m ago•1 comments

AI Research Is Getting Harder to Separate from Geopolitics

https://www.wired.com/story/made-in-china-ai-research-is-starting-to-split-along-geopolitical-lines/
3•joozio•20m ago•0 comments

Why This Jump in Gas Prices Feels Different

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/upshot/gas-prices-lookup.html
1•karakoram•21m ago•1 comments

Google to finance data center project leased to Anthropic

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4569914-google-to-finance-data-center-project-leased-to-anthropic
2•maneprajakta•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Spectator a cross platform DSL for cybersecurity

1•CzaxTanmay•27m ago•0 comments

I Caught a 3.4M Daily Download Supply Chain Attack

https://miles0sage.github.io/codeguard-mcp/blog.html
2•Miles0•30m ago•1 comments

The Superorganism Explained in 7 Minutes

https://natehagens.substack.com/p/why-the-world-feels-like-its-falling
2•shrubby•37m ago•1 comments

Simple English Wikipedia

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
5•microflash•42m ago•1 comments

Building NetPulse: from MRTG replacement to something much bigger

https://as215855.net/posts/building-netpulse
1•miyuru•44m ago•0 comments

Over 11,000 munitions in 16 Days of the Iran War

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/over-11000-munitions-16-days-ir...
1•stubish•45m ago•0 comments

TUI for Vibe Coders

https://github.com/hritupitu/vibetui/tree/main
2•hritvikagarwal•53m ago•2 comments

Reducing our monorepo size to improve developer velocity

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/reducing-our-monorepo-size-to-improve-developer-velocity
2•vinhnx•54m ago•1 comments

CSS Refactoring with an AI Safety Net

https://danielabaron.me/blog/css-refactoring-with-an-ai-safety-net/
3•vinhnx•54m ago•0 comments

Understanding LRU Caches in Go: Part 2

https://learnwithtimi.substack.com/p/2-understanding-least-recently-used
1•giddy_dev•56m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Layer – Hide your personal AI files from Git without touching gitignore

https://crates.io/crates/git-layer
3•aungsiminhtet•1h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Anybody tried to cheat AI-HR-system with hidden/white sentences?

3•KellyCriterion•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: WordGen a Robust Wordlist Maker

1•CzaxTanmay•1h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: A Product Healing Agent, your thoughts?

1•gokulnair2001•1h ago•0 comments

C Preprocessor tricks, tips, and idioms

https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/wiki/C-Preprocessor-tricks,-tips,-and-idioms
1•signa11•1h ago•0 comments

Engineered yeast provides rare but essential nutrition for honeybees

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09431-y
1•ludicrousdispla•1h ago•0 comments

Tree Editor – apply and remove types without breaking your data

https://github.com/justindmassey/tree-editor
2•justindmassey•1h ago•0 comments

Llama.cpp with CUDA Support on Original Jetson Nano (4GB)

https://github.com/kreier/llama.cpp-jetson
2•Abishek_Muthian•1h ago•2 comments

LLMs on a PowerPC Mac

http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2025/03/thinking-different-thinking-slowly-llms.html
1•austinallegro•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: WordGen, a fast and easy to use wordlist generator

1•CzaxTanmay•1h ago•0 comments