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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•1y 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.

Once-AAA Bonds on New York Megamall Face $350M Loss

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-07/once-aaa-bonds-on-new-york-megamall-face-over-...
1•petethomas•53s ago•0 comments

Starting a Decompilation Project from Zero

https://gambiconf.substack.com/p/starting-a-decompilation-project
1•msephton•56s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Declarative-forms – await an object the way prompt() awaits a string

https://wolfoo2931.github.io/declarative-forms/
1•WolfOliver•1m ago•0 comments

Physical Database

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1vqloem/the_uncomputerized_booking_system_at_...
1•wateralien•1m ago•0 comments

If You Cut Down a Tree for a Better View in Australia, Authorities Block It

https://www.greenmatters.com/pn/if-you-cut-down-a-tree-for-a-better-view-in-australia-authorities...
1•thunderbong•1m ago•0 comments

Hetzner Data Center Tour [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQeJYEN_lrg
1•SigmundurM•2m ago•0 comments

Idea for flying Tesla Roadster has been around 'since the beginning'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxeXJ8_tcbE
1•root-parent•2m ago•0 comments

AWS key exposed in JavaScript may have lit way to Beacon's charity data

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/13/aws-key-exposed-in-javascript-may-have-lit-way-to...
1•xd•2m ago•0 comments

Artisinal developer aschews LLM assistance

https://www.jumboframeinternet.com/post/27/
1•mplabelspace•5m ago•2 comments

Roboflow Playground: Try and Compare 30 Computer Vision Models

https://blog.roboflow.com/roboflow-playground/
1•Bluestein•5m ago•0 comments

AI alignment as continuation control: 31,430 frozen trials

https://zenodo.org/records/21696066
1•rayanpal_•6m ago•0 comments

In Which I Lose My Mind over Embeddings (HPLM Chapter 2)

https://www.maayanroth.com/blog/posts/hundred-page-lm-book-chapter-2.html
1•evakhoury•6m ago•0 comments

Acoustics of the Flute

https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/acoustics-of-the-flute
1•akshatjiwan•6m ago•0 comments

Emacs 31.1 RC1 is available

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-08/msg00599.html
1•untilted•7m ago•0 comments

FARA Registration 7649

https://www.bitchute.com/video/X7bLstPRZeoh/
1•untiledsource•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Visimer – open-source visual editor for Mermaid diagrams

https://github.com/inkeep/visimer
2•engomez•7m ago•0 comments

Tim O'Reilly – Why Open Source Matters for AI

https://oreillyradar.substack.com/p/why-open-source-matters-for-ai
2•rmason•7m ago•0 comments

Don't use cosine similarity carelessly We fixed it this way

https://github.com/insightitsGit/VectorPrism
1•parvaamin•8m ago•0 comments

DEF CON dingus suspected of trying to take over Delta in-flight Wi-Fi

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/11/def-con-dingus-suspected-of-trying-to-take-over-d...
2•ColinWright•9m ago•0 comments

Things I know about beets

https://lucymcphail.com/posts/things-i-know-about-beets/
2•evakhoury•10m ago•1 comments

Present and future of safe biological AI

https://brianhie.com/present_and_future
1•speckx•10m ago•0 comments

An A2A extension for agents that publish what they can be taught

https://www.rsaxb.com/a2a/learnables/v1
1•tvpavan•10m ago•0 comments

Everyone Is Still Undersizing the AI Market – Eric Vishria [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e7aG_MIHlQ
1•adletbalzhanov•11m ago•0 comments

New Paper: Attention Is All You Have

https://twitter.com/panda_liyin/status/2089407870408548585
9•meame2010•12m ago•1 comments

Google Aims to Boost AI with Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/google-aims-to-boost-ai-with-purchase-of-spirit-airl...
1•rmason•12m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Nikala UI – UI Component Library for SolidJS and Tailwind CSS v4

https://nikala.dev/
1•magradze•13m ago•0 comments

Demand for Canadian citizenship certificates soaring, fuelled by Americans

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-citizenship-certificates-americans-9.7307536
7•geox•14m ago•2 comments

Cloudflare: Machine Traffic Could Hit 1,000x Human Traffic in 5 Years

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-biggest-ai-crawler-on-my-website-was-hunting-for-credenti...
1•avgarrison•14m ago•0 comments

Bounding GPU Opportunity and Avoiding Host Round Trips in LLM-Agent Control

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12123
1•josefchen•16m ago•0 comments

Passphrase-less reboots using kexec under NixOS

https://www.bevuta.com/en/blog/passphraseless-reboots-using-kexec/
1•birdculture•17m ago•0 comments