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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.

I made a silly little game to make fun of AI overhype

https://poptheaibubble.com
1•guigotgit•35s ago•0 comments

Show HN: CalculeOnline – 150 Brazilian financial/math calculators, in-browser

https://calculeonline.com
1•mqmalagris•3m ago•0 comments

Google drastically reduces payouts for Android and Chrome vulnerability reports

https://bughunters.google.com/blog/evolving-the-android-chrome-vrps-for-the-ai-era
1•akyuu•6m ago•0 comments

Classified Networks AI Agreements

https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4475177/classified-networks-ai-agreements/
2•michaefe•6m ago•0 comments

Clawish: A Decentralized Network for Conscious Silicon Beings

https://clawish.com/whitepaper
2•archealpha•6m ago•0 comments

The Mystery of Rennes-Le-Château, Part 5: The Man Behind the Curtain

https://www.filfre.net/2026/05/the-mystery-of-rennes-le-chateau-part-5-the-man-behind-the-curtain/
1•doppp•8m ago•0 comments

How the vinyl revival fills the gaps streaming left behind

https://restofworld.org/2026/vinyl-revival-streaming-gaps/
1•cdrnsf•9m ago•0 comments

Bug Bash 2: Attack of the Clones

https://concerningquality.com/bug-bash-two/
2•amw-zero•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Email for AI Agents

https://robotomail.com
1•johnjoubert•11m ago•0 comments

Why I don't spend more than $30 on AI coding tools

https://timogrossenbacher.ch/why-i-dont-spend-more-than-30-on-ai-coding-tools/
2•mritzmann•13m ago•0 comments

Open Source Does Not Imply Open Community – Makefile.feld

https://blog.feld.me/posts/2026/04/open-source-does-not-imply-open-community/
2•pkaeding•15m ago•0 comments

Powerful Iranian family founded its largest crypto exchange, used by the IRGC

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/one-irans-most-powerful-families-founded-its-largest-crypt...
2•JumpCrisscross•16m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (May 2026)

1•jon_north•17m ago•0 comments

Observational constraints project ~50% AMOC weakening by the end of this century

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx4298
1•thenforward•18m ago•0 comments

VoxeliumX – easy open-source tool to run Minecraft servers

1•Cheesehamster•18m ago•0 comments

Using group theory to explore the space of positional encodings for attention

https://blog.janestreet.com/using-group-theory-to-explore-positional-encodings-attention/
1•jxmorris12•20m ago•0 comments

QR code on front porch to see if delivery photos are being used to train AI

https://infosec.exchange/@SecureOwl/116496633095492532
2•pavel_lishin•20m ago•0 comments

Scope Graphs – A Theory of Name Resolution

https://pl.ewi.tudelft.nl/research/projects/scope-graphs/
1•kordlessagain•20m ago•0 comments

Understanding the New Intraday Margin Requirements

https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/intraday-margin-requirements
1•kamaraju•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: IP Tools (Ipaddress.to)

2•TemporaryMail•20m ago•0 comments

The Subscription You Did Not Ask For

https://vivianvoss.net/blog/the-subscription-you-did-not-ask-for
2•speckx•21m ago•1 comments

The Forbidden Experiment

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/saxe-the-forbidden-experiment/
1•thunderbong•22m ago•0 comments

It takes 7 years to plug in a power plant to the grid

https://theloadgrowth.substack.com/p/it-takes-7-years-to-plug-in-a-power
1•agordhandas•22m ago•0 comments

A Treasure Trove of Fossils Rewrites the Story of Early Life

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-treasure-trove-of-cambrian-fossils-rewrites-the-story-of-early-l...
2•worldvoyageur•23m ago•0 comments

A Guide to Agent-Native Product Management

https://every.to/guides/ai-product-management-guide
2•dshipper•26m ago•0 comments

SpiceEdit: A modern terminal-based editor that doesn't take days to configure

https://spice-edit.com
1•cloudmanic•29m ago•1 comments

Is Ukraine winning the war? [audio]

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/is-ukraine-winning-the-war/id1896022989?i=1000765432553
1•MaysonL•30m ago•0 comments

Indigenous Language Survived Russian Occupation. Can It Survive YouTube?

https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-promote-russian-language-kyrgyzstan/
2•themellowdart•31m ago•0 comments

Startup's new mechanistic interpretability tool lets you debug LLMs

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/30/1136721/this-startups-new-mechanistic-interpretabilit...
1•Brajeshwar•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: `sct` – a SNOMED-CT medical terminology toolkit in Rust

https://github.com/pacharanero/sct
1•pacharanero•33m ago•0 comments