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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.

Writing Z80 assembly, 4 decades later:-)

https://github.com/ttsiodras/3D-on-a-ZX-Spectrum-48K/
1•ttsiodras•1m ago•0 comments

MegaTrain Full Precision Training of 100B+ Parameter LLMs on a Single GPU

https://github.com/DLYuanGod/MegaTrain
1•adulau•4m ago•0 comments

WHO declares Ebola outbreak in DR Congo a global health emergency

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2l2p0wwzzdo
1•lifeisstillgood•4m ago•0 comments

Ra

https://qntm.org/ra
2•sim04ful•16m ago•0 comments

How to Tell If You're Living in a Binary Crisis

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-tell-if-youre-living-in-a-8ee
1•Khaine•20m ago•0 comments

Strait of Hormuz submarine cable

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/17/middleeast/iran-hormuz-undersea-cables-intl
1•reconnecting•21m ago•0 comments

Towards local plug-and-play AI

https://adlrocha.substack.com/p/adlrocha-towards-local-plug-and-play
1•adlrocha•27m ago•0 comments

Why are there squares everywhere in statistics?

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/05/16/why-are-there-squares-everywhere-in-statistics-...
1•Tomte•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Extendable API Gateway Written in Go

2•starwalkn•31m ago•1 comments

Std: Is_heap Could Be Faster

https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2026/05/11/is-heap/
1•signa11•32m ago•0 comments

Trump's More Than 3,700 Trades Astonish Wall Street Insiders

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-14/trump-bought-nvidia-boeing-microsoft-in-flurry...
2•_tk_•32m ago•0 comments

Unit Testing's Eval Twin

https://volary.ai/articles/unit-testings-eval-twin
2•CamouflagedKiwi•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Onami Radio, a simple radio app for iOS

https://marigov.github.io/onami/
3•marigov•41m ago•0 comments

BT.1886 Shorthand Is a Trap

https://daejeonchronicles.com/2026/05/07/bt-1886-shorthand-is-a-trap/
1•Prasadnarava•42m ago•0 comments

Judge Says Krafton Must Rehire Fired 'Subnautica' CEO

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-16/judge-says-krafton-must-rehire-fired-subnautic...
1•_tk_•48m ago•0 comments

Softmax in front of CrossEntropyLoss: 16 other bugs PyTorch won't catch

https://gaox.substack.com/p/how-a-road-network-library-helped
1•neurarch•49m ago•0 comments

A Basic Interpreter in Markdown, Running "Natively" in Claude Code

https://dunkels.com/adam/llm-basic-interpreter-markdown/
1•adunk•54m ago•0 comments

Playing Atari ST Music on the Amiga with Zero CPU

https://arnaud-carre.github.io/2026-05-15-ym-fast-emu/
10•z303•57m ago•0 comments

Patrick Collison – Detroit Impressions

https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/2055733308877881807
1•rmason•1h ago•1 comments

UWB Mobile Suica isn't just walk-through gates, it's payments too

https://atadistance.net/2026/05/13/uwb-mobile-suica-isnt-just-walkthrough-gates-its-payments-too/
1•ksec•1h ago•0 comments

ConnectAI – LinkedIn DM Generator

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/connectai-—-linkedin-dm-g/cjfnhjpheldgcfmipcmibbmlfmpf...
1•sujalmeena•1h ago•2 comments

Contrast-Proofing Colors with CSS

https://dan-webnotes.com/posts/2026-05-16-contrast-proofing-colors/
1•dandep•1h ago•0 comments

Ten Signs of Fascism. America has all of them

https://rutgerbregman.substack.com/p/10-signs-of-fascism-america-has-all
33•fredski42•1h ago•8 comments

What the FDA won't tell you about your medications (transcript, Propublica)

https://www.propublica.org/podcast/what-fda-wont-tell-you-generic-drugs-safety
1•abawany•1h ago•0 comments

I built a fake Phantom wallet generator

https://larpwallet.app
1•Jhoney•1h ago•2 comments

Neptune: Direct3D Virtualization for QEMU

https://blog.getutm.app/2026/introducing-neptune-direct3d-virtualization-for-qemu/
2•oofdere•1h ago•0 comments

From raw logs to programmable EVM execution intelligence

https://blog.bridgexapi.io/the-anatomy-of-programmable-evm-execution-intelligence
1•Bridgexapi•1h ago•0 comments

kharp – k version 3 Language Interpreter in C#

https://github.com/ERufian/ksharp
1•tosh•1h ago•0 comments

2ality blog: temporarily offline due to AI stealing work

https://2ality.com/
3•mmarian•1h ago•2 comments

Domain Knowledge Is the Leverage

https://log.beshr.com/domain-knowledge-is-the-leverage/
1•beshrkayali•1h ago•0 comments