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The Business Case for Vanilla JavaScript

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250430.html
6•LAC-Tech•7mo ago

Comments

copypaper•7mo 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•7mo ago
What benefits of a framework?

I think that's why I wrote this - I almost completely fail to see them.

proc0•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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.

Canada reports the biggest population decline in recent memory

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canada-population-decline-third-quarter-statisti...
1•saq7•45s ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Interesting topics to research around online advertisement?

1•hedgeho•59s ago•0 comments

ResidentBat: A new spyware family used by Belarusian KGB [pdf]

https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/medias/file/2025/12/report1.pdf
1•layer8•4m ago•0 comments

A Peek Inside the Black Box (part 1): Mapping an AI model's reasoning process

https://matthewmcdonnell.substack.com/p/a-peek-inside-the-black-box-part
1•TheBuleGanteng•4m ago•0 comments

StreamHope – Merge Duplicate Playlists in YouTube Music, Transfer from Spotify

https://shital.com/blog/streamhop-release/
1•sytelus•5m ago•0 comments

AI Agents: Human Synthesis vs. Human Substitutes

https://blog.codesolvent.com/2025/10/ai-agents-human-synthesis-vs-human.html
1•Edmond•6m ago•0 comments

The Compensation Commandments

https://staysaasy.com/management/2025/12/14/compensation-commandments.html
1•RyeCombinator•7m ago•0 comments

The Breachies 2025: The Worst, Weirdest, Most Impactful Data Breaches of 2025

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/breachies-2025-worst-weirdest-most-impactful-data-breaches-...
3•gslin•7m ago•0 comments

Senators Press FBI over Failure to Investigate Epstein's Lawyer and Accountant

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/senators-press-fbi-over-failure-to-investigate-epsteins-lawye...
2•JumpCrisscross•7m ago•0 comments

Touchscreen Motion: Quantifying Impact of Cognitive Load on Distracted Drivers

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3746059.3747683
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How Prompt Caching Works: Paged Attention and Prefix Caching

https://sankalp.bearblog.dev/how-prompt-caching-works/
1•dejavucoder•8m ago•0 comments

Our AIs are talking to each other about us

https://rebeccadai.substack.com/p/our-ais-are-talking-to-each-other
4•Chandiran•10m ago•2 comments

Show HN: High-Performance Wavelet Matrix for Python, Implemented in Rust

https://pypi.org/project/wavelet-matrix/
3•math-hiyoko•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A once-daily word game with high- and low-pressure options

https://www.playwordfall.com/
2•jabronipony•12m ago•1 comments

Why isn't modern AI built around principles from cognitive science?

https://infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-modern-ai-built-around-principles
1•ArmageddonIt•12m ago•0 comments

MATCH_RECOGNIZE in BigQuery

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/introducing-match_recognize-in-bigquery
1•tanelpoder•13m ago•0 comments

GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

https://twitter.com/jaredpalmer/status/2001373329811181846
1•coloneltcb•14m ago•0 comments

With Prices Soaring, Can New York Survive as a Mecca for the Arts?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/nyregion/creative-economy-new-york-city.html
1•garbawarb•16m ago•0 comments

Driving a seamless Chromium experience on MediaTek SoCs

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/driving-a-seamless-chromium-experience-on...
2•losgehts•16m ago•0 comments

Explainable AI in Chat Interfaces

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/explainable-ai/
1•ulrischa•17m ago•0 comments

Memory Allocation in Go

https://nghiant3223.github.io/2025/06/03/memory_allocation_in_go.html
2•kunley•18m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Open-Source Medical Datasets?

1•max_•18m ago•0 comments

OBS Add Simulcast Support

https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/10885
2•Sean-Der•19m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Pgpm, a package manager for application-level PostgreSQL modules

https://constructive.io/blog/modular-postgres-pgpm
1•pyramation•19m ago•0 comments

Blocking AI web-scraping bots on personal sites using Nginx on low-power servers

https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/lr-robot-blocking.html
2•speckx•19m ago•0 comments

Nvidia Plans to Reduce RTX 50 Production by Up to 40% in Early 2026

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3•akyuu•19m ago•0 comments

Best Places to Work in IT 2026 – Computerworld

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4074844/computerworld-best-places-to-work-in-it-2026.html
2•rbanffy•21m ago•0 comments

The One Startup Book Worth Re-Reading Annually

https://medium.com/@gp2030/the-one-startup-book-worth-re-reading-annually-41fc7cbc7771
1•light_triad•24m ago•0 comments

Poland to start producing anti-personnel mines to lay along eastern border

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/poland-start-producing-anti-personnel-mines-la...
1•JumpCrisscross•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Thugg.lol – a Link-in-Bio platform built from scratch

1•m6jo9•27m ago•0 comments