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The Business Case for Vanilla JavaScript

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250430.html
6•LAC-Tech•8mo ago

Comments

copypaper•8mo 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•8mo ago
What benefits of a framework?

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

proc0•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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.

D-Wave Makes Gate-Model Power Move with Quantum Circuits Buy

https://www.nextplatform.com/2026/01/07/d-wave-makes-gate-model-power-move-with-quantum-circuits-...
1•rbanffy•22s ago•0 comments

Brew-vulns: CVE scanning for Homebrew

https://nesbitt.io/2026/01/08/brew-vulns-cve-scanning-for-homebrew.html
1•chmaynard•1m ago•0 comments

Scaling for Billions of Records: Sub-50ms Analytics with Elasticsearch

https://manuel.friger.io/blog/sub-50ms-analytics-how-we-scaled-reporting-for-billions-of-records/
1•Mnlfrgr•2m ago•0 comments

Simulate Buyer Personas: The Focus Group for Growth !!!

https://blog.vect.pro/simulate-buyer-persona-guide
1•WoWSaaS•2m ago•1 comments

Jet-validators is now the fastest non- compiled schema validation library

https://moltar.github.io/typescript-runtime-type-benchmarks/
1•spmaxwell7•5m ago•0 comments

Yearly Recap Insights for Google/Outlook Calendar

https://actordo.com/calendar-app-calendar-insights/
1•websku•5m ago•0 comments

The golden age of vaccine development

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-golden-age-of-vaccine-development/
1•ortegaygasset•6m ago•0 comments

Using unstructured data to fuel enterprise AI success

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/08/1129506/using-unstructured-data-to-fuel-enterprise-ai...
1•fleahunter•6m ago•0 comments

Problems in the Theory of Ideology, by Joseph Heath [pdf]

https://induecourse.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/piti.pdf
1•lordleft•7m ago•0 comments

Join viewers worldwide for an unprecedented live experience

https://the-event.one
1•cranberryturkey•8m ago•0 comments

Gmail is entering the Gemini Era

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gmail/gmail-is-entering-the-gemini-era/
2•xnx•8m ago•0 comments

The data center rebellion is here, and it's reshaping the political landscape

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/01/06/data-centers-backlash-impact-local-communities...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: High deterministic real time in Python with copy and patch compiler

https://copapy.nonan.net
1•Saloc•10m ago•0 comments

Why most AI-generated content fails before it's published (how I test resonance)

https://blog.vect.pro/resonance-engine-guide
1•MMAFRAZ•10m ago•0 comments

Multithreading in PHP: Looking to the Future

https://medium.com/@edmond.ht/multithreading-in-php-looking-to-the-future-4f42a48e47fe
1•speckx•10m ago•0 comments

OpenAI putting bandaids on bandaids as prompt injection problems keep festering

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/08/openai_chatgpt_prompt_injection/
1•_____k•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DeepDream for Video with Temporal Consistency

https://github.com/jeremicna/deepdream-video-pytorch
2•fruitbarrel•12m ago•0 comments

The Valley of the Shadow of Death (2008)

https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death/
1•Tomte•12m ago•0 comments

Microsoft reshuffles teams to bolster GitHub as AI coding and agent wars heat up

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-reshuffle-ai-coding-agents-2026-1
1•_____k•15m ago•0 comments

The Looting of US Foreign Policy

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-looting-of-us-foreign-policy
2•rbanffy•15m ago•0 comments

Using DistributedDataParallel to train a base model from scratch in the cloud

https://www.gilesthomas.com/2026/01/llm-from-scratch-29-ddp-training-a-base-model-in-the-cloud
1•ibobev•19m ago•0 comments

Migrating from Parcel to Vite

https://code.movie/blog/website-update-moving-from-parcel-to-vite.html
1•sir_pepe•19m ago•0 comments

LimeSDR Micro: An open M.2 and mPCIe software-defined radio

https://www.crowdsupply.com/lime-micro/limesdr-micro
1•ibobev•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A marketplace for indie ad spots

https://adventory.to
1•ugo_builds•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Video recordings turned with AI to slides ready for presentations

https://notefy.pro/
1•jimmydin7•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Plagiarismremover.ai – plagiarism remover focused on formatting

https://plagiarismremover.ai/
1•PlagiarismRem•22m ago•0 comments

Shortages Cause Sky-Rocketing RAM Prices

https://www.goto10retro.com/p/shortages-cause-sky-rocketing-ram
1•ibobev•22m ago•0 comments

How Did TVs Get So Cheap?

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-did-tvs-get-so-cheap
5•thelastgallon•23m ago•1 comments

NASA considers evacuating ailing crew member from International Space Station

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-postpones-space-station-spacewalk-due-to-crew-members-...
1•falcor84•25m ago•0 comments

Will memory fail the AI boom?

https://www.sdxcentral.com/analysis/will-memory-fail-the-ai-boom/
1•ironyman•25m ago•0 comments