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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.

How to Write Computer Programs [pdf]

https://www.dyalog.com/uploads/documents/Papers/declarative_prog.pdf
1•tosh•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Ghostty in-browser with real client-side back end

https://ghosttyplayground.com/
1•leebeef•1m ago•0 comments

20 years of Intel Macs: Why Apple switched, and why it switched again

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/20-years-of-intel-macs-why-apple-switched-and-why-it-swit...
1•rbanffy•3m ago•0 comments

The End of Refugee Resettlement

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-jordan/the-end-of-refugee-resettlement
1•littlexsparkee•5m ago•0 comments

Typst 0.15 Is Out

https://typst.app/blog/2026/typst-0.15/
1•semantecture•8m ago•1 comments

We Built NeuroAutomata: protein variant effect prediction

https://axonagentic.ai/blog/why-we-built-neuroautomata
1•rhokstar•9m ago•0 comments

The Most Interesting Articles on Wikipedia

https://www.mostdiscussed.com
1•vismit2000•11m ago•0 comments

Are Memories Transferable – Or Edible?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/are-memories-transferable-or-edible-20260605/
2•doener•13m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Best Hetzner Alternatives?

1•king_zee•14m ago•0 comments

DEC Alpha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha
2•tosh•14m ago•0 comments

Physicists Have Measured "Negative Time" in Quantum Experiment

https://scitechdaily.com/physicists-have-measured-negative-time-in-bizarre-quantum-experiment/
2•bryanrasmussen•15m ago•0 comments

Photograph Is Now Guilty Until Proven Innocent

https://winphotoio.substack.com/p/sunday-submission-04-the-burden-of-proof
2•winphoto•20m ago•0 comments

Kino, a high-performance Ractor web server for Ruby 4.0

https://github.com/yaroslav/kino
1•riffraff•22m ago•0 comments

General-purpose LLMs outperform specialized clinical AI tools

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04431-5
1•hdvr•22m ago•0 comments

Understanding the rationale behind a rule when trying to circumvent it

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260611-00/?p=112415
7•tosh•31m ago•0 comments

China's universities cut 12,000 'obsolete' degrees amid race to embrace AI era

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3356913/chinas-universities-cut-12000-obsolete...
2•spwa4•34m ago•0 comments

Users cry foul after AMD stripped memory crypto from its consumer CPUs

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/users-cry-foul-after-amd-stripped-memory-crypto-from-its...
3•u1hcw9nx•34m ago•0 comments

Why did I create my own PaaS as indie hacker and made it open-source?

https://github.com/sumon-ohid/better-paas
2•sumonoahid•45m ago•1 comments

Making a Metasearch Engine (2024)

https://matdoes.dev/metasearch
2•ethanhawksley•47m ago•0 comments

The History of How School Buses Became Yellow

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-how-school-buses-became-yellow-180973041/
2•thunderbong•48m ago•0 comments

Pure-Dart I2P: decentralized file sharing

https://github.com/geograms/i2p-dart
1•nunobrito•53m ago•0 comments

Greed Is Learned: Visible Incentives as Reward-Hacking Triggers

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16914
2•Timofeibu•55m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Kitchen Rush, Overcooked inspired LLM tool calling benchmark

https://github.com/bassimeledath/kitchen-rush
2•bombastic311•56m ago•0 comments

Movebound: The Art of Zugzwang

https://www.thearticle.com/movebound-the-art-of-zugzwang
1•Pamar•56m ago•0 comments

Discovery debt: The debt that doesn't slow you down

https://www.leadinginproduct.com/p/discovery-debt
2•benkan•56m ago•0 comments

The US government's Anthropic models ban was never about an AI jailbreak

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/15/the-us-governments-anthropic-models-ban-was-never-about-an-ai-j...
2•SilverElfin•56m ago•1 comments

Why do South Koreans love AI so much?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/15/1138983/why-do-south-koreans-love-ai-so-much/
1•joozio•1h ago•0 comments

Cross-Language Data Types

https://ekxide.io/blog/cross-language-data-types/
1•birdculture•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: A spreadsheet where your code never reads B7

https://github.com/logisky/LogiSheets/discussions/415
1•JeremyHe•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: GitHits Public Beta 0.9

https://githits.com/
2•skvark•1h ago•0 comments