frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

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.

A digital bank's collapse toppled Paraguay's president

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/how-digital-banks-collapse-toppled-paraguays-president-2...
1•geox•4m ago•0 comments

View / Nvidia's $4.5T test of founder immunity

https://www.semafor.com/article/11/08/2026/nvidias-45-trillion-test-of-founder-immunity
1•snikolaev•5m ago•0 comments

AO3's outage has been a boon for Tumblr, especially among Gen Z

https://mashable.com/life/ao3-down-tumblr-boon-among-gen-z
1•rdmuser•5m ago•0 comments

Humans' Origin Story Is Being Revised [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs
1•pizzaiolo•9m ago•0 comments

The Collision: What AI Does to Us

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/collision-what-ai-does-to-us
1•ilamont•10m ago•0 comments

Nvidia CEO Affair with Chinese Spy

https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/08/business/nvidia-investigation-ceo-jensen-huang
1•jokksc•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: clap.cpp – Audio embedding inference in C++ (GGML)

https://github.com/gorse-io/clap.cpp
2•lutun•19m ago•0 comments

Why MariaDB is giving financial services a cache of its own

https://mariadb.com/resources/blog/why-mariadb-is-giving-financial-services-a-cache-of-its-own/
3•Klaster_1•21m ago•0 comments

Elegy for What's Left of the Normal

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fooXeRHjgpv4TcoRy/elegy-for-what-s-left-of-the-normal
1•jdkee•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Flide: Make Jev-like decision models up to 9.5x faster

https://github.com/OmniJev/Flide
2•unikcc•22m ago•0 comments

Michael Burry's public calls would have played out

https://henryzhang.substack.com/p/how-michael-burrys-public-calls-would
1•henryzhangpku•26m ago•0 comments

Hide your slop PR descriptions behind <details><summary>

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/9/details-summary/
3•acossta•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A diffusion model that runs in pure CSS, no JavaScript

https://metrix187.github.io/diffusion.css/
2•quantara•49m ago•0 comments

D200mm: A New Scale for Single‑Crystal Diamond

https://www.df.com/insights/d200mm-single-crystal-diamond
2•addaon•51m ago•0 comments

The bonus that makes employees more committed

https://uwaterloo.ca/school-of-accounting-and-finance/news/bonus-makes-employees-more-committed
3•rohanm93•52m ago•0 comments

I Resist Generative "AI"

https://estherweidauer.com/articles/why-resist-generative-ai.html
3•isolay•53m ago•1 comments

Best-Effort Extent-Same, a btrfs dedupe agent

https://github.com/Zygo/bees
2•modinfo•54m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Just Dashboard, an open-source VPS management dashboard

https://github.com/JustDashboard/Just-Dashboard
2•Wayy01•57m ago•0 comments

Cryptocurrencies slide to two-month lows after US midterms

https://www.reuters.com/business/cryptocurrencies-slide-two-month-lows-after-us-midterms-2026-11-08/
2•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•1 comments

Slavdom Unearthed: Marian Wawrzeniecki's Neopagan Paintings (1891–1923)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/marian-wawrzeniecki/
1•lermontov•1h ago•0 comments

Pay per pre-configured GPU hour or per token for open-source LLM inference?

4•yiro13•1h ago•0 comments

Praxia [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxB-jh96kVY
1•tasshin•1h ago•1 comments

A Critique of GPUI

https://blog.zortax.de/posts/a-critique-of-gpui
24•ByteAtATime•1h ago•5 comments

New Zealand children can't hold a pencil properly – new study

https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/relationships/family/new-zealand-children-can-t-hold-a-pencil-properly...
2•colinprince•1h ago•1 comments

P2P model hosting and inference WebGPU,libp2p,IPFS

https://metaversejs.github.io/peercompute/inference/
1•gnarbarian•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: I got laid off and built a competitor website change tracker

https://lifeadminpilot.com/tool
3•ff114514•1h ago•0 comments

Human Tamagotchis: The Future of Health

https://briankitano.com/essays/patient-sandbox/
1•bkitano19•1h ago•0 comments

PlusOS: OS for the Macintosh Plus and SE

https://github.com/g91/PlusOS
4•phendrenad2•1h ago•1 comments

AML Cycle 2 results are approaching: What should agent memory benchmarks reveal?

https://twitter.com/AgentMemoryL/status/2118704959344493029
3•IreneAI•1h ago•0 comments

Anthropic, stop silently degrading models. You will undermine trust

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1xqtslm/rant_anthropic_stop_silently_degrading_models/
2•cft•1h ago•0 comments