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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 One Connection Kills a Database

https://planetscale.com/blog/debugging-live-database-connections
1•vzhou842•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: TripleFantasy Reconstructed Source Code

https://github.com/Sadpainy/TripleFantasy
1•CMDDestory•8m ago•0 comments

Timeline of Mathematics

https://mathigon.org/timeline
2•o4c•9m ago•0 comments

Autodafe VES: a free vintage emulator studio plugin based on MAME framework

https://synthanatomy.com/2026/09/autodafe-ves-a-free-vintage-emulator-studio-plugin.html
1•bane•12m ago•1 comments

We have a year to fix security everywhere

https://jyn.dev/a-year-to-fix-security/
5•saikatsg•15m ago•0 comments

A Modern Proxmox Docker Architecture with Disposable VMs, VirtIO-FS, and ZFS

https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2026-05-16_rootless_docker_virtiofs_proxmox/
1•Helmut10001•23m ago•0 comments

Cognition Has More Than One Shape: From AI to Synthetic Cognition

https://tvvocold.github.io/2026/09/08/cognition-has-more-than-one-shape.html
2•tvvocold•23m ago•0 comments

The VMs Powering Mobile Agents (Instinct, Claude Code)

https://rohanadwankar.github.io/posts/platforms.html
2•RohanAdwankar•26m ago•1 comments

Canada's counter-tariffs take effect on various US goods

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260908-canada-s-counter-tariffs-take-effect-on-various-us...
5•geox•36m ago•0 comments

Bonds – AI messenger where group chats generate their own apps

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bonds-the-smart-messenger/id6798100604
1•juanchoabdon1•38m ago•0 comments

RabbitMQ vs. Apache Kafka

https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/compare/kafka
2•vinhnx•38m ago•0 comments

Evidence runtime for autonomous agent task management

https://grainulator.app
3•aid-ninja•38m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Manhattan Safety Atlas

https://manhattan-neighborhood-atlas.pplx.app/
1•tesseractinf•41m ago•0 comments

Shatranj

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatranj
1•teleforce•42m ago•0 comments

Secret screening of Nathan Fielder's new Elizabeth Holmes documentary

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2026-09-07/nathan-fielder-elizabeth-holme...
1•aanet•42m ago•2 comments

Australia to opt out of social media algorithms, Albanese confirms

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-to-opt-out-of-social-media-algorithms-albanese-...
2•mrkpdl•42m ago•0 comments

Experience is becoming a higher priority for tech hiring

https://www.a16z.news/p/chart-of-the-week-experience-skills
2•deepmem•46m ago•0 comments

GifBook – turn any GIF into a printable flipbook (free)

https://www.mrbray.com/gifbook
1•mrbray•53m ago•1 comments

Uncensored Open-Weight Models: Redistribution as the Persistence Layer

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05241
1•sbulaev•56m ago•0 comments

Things to Do with Tailscale

https://toce.ch/101-things-to-do-with-tailscale/
2•cyb0rg0•56m ago•0 comments

Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU: desktop-class mobile gameplay with AI-native graphics

https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-mali-g2-ultra-nx-ai-native-mobile-graphics
13•Re-Tails•56m ago•4 comments

Why the Harness Matters More Than the Model [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9xKblqyQ28
3•mellosouls•59m ago•0 comments

Pope's Top US Cardinals Visit Silicon Valley, Warn Millions Will Lose Jobs

https://www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/pope-leo-xivs-top-us-cardinals-visit
2•MaxLeiter•1h ago•0 comments

Magnum Opus

https://nexum.fyi/
1•wbeebe•1h ago•1 comments

Sen. Kennedy rails against AI developers as 'high IQ stupid people'

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/06/kennedy-ai-developers-high-iq-stupid-people-01066756
1•apical_dendrite•1h ago•0 comments

Blast Radius 1.0

https://blastradius.dpdns.org/
1•codebyaditya•1h ago•0 comments

How the heart, lungs and brain work together to shape experience

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-09-heart-lungs-brain.html
1•mdp2021•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit Shaders (Hotloaded)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Oc2V5fDUc
1•amirrajan•1h ago•1 comments

I tested 10 model/harness combinations on the same Three.js task

https://alvins82.github.io/hangar-harness-model-tests/
7•alvins82•1h ago•1 comments

GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea

https://leaflet.pub/p/did:plc:yhgc5rlqhoezrx6fbawajxlh/3muwrqenzfk2n
2•drasticactions•1h ago•0 comments