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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.

Reddit begins testing a new audio and video experience, similar to TikTok videos

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/17/reddit-begins-testing-a-new-audio-and-video-experience-similar-...
1•HelloUsername•2m ago•0 comments

Measuring Obedience to Authority Across LLMs with the Milgram Paradigm

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16177
1•sbulaev•6m ago•0 comments

OpenAI disbanded the team that assessed catastrophic model risks

https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-preparedness-team-disbanded-ipo-streamlining
1•nyku•6m ago•0 comments

Four Levels of In-Place Initialization

https://blog.yoshuawuyts.com/four-levels-of-in-place-initialization/
1•birdculture•9m ago•0 comments

Europe's heatwave boosted solar by up to 17% on hot days

https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/14/the-real-challenge-starts-after-sundown-europes-heatwave-boos...
1•benkan•9m ago•0 comments

Jellyfish force shutdown of three reactors at French nuclear plant

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/08/11/jellyfish-force-shutdown-of-three-reactors-at...
1•benkan•9m ago•0 comments

qwen3.8-27B likes bash

https://twitter.com/hxiao/status/2089483485547544959
1•tosh•9m ago•0 comments

Meta faces a $1.4T reckoning in latest trial over social media addiction

https://www.engadget.com/2237547/meta-faces-a-1-4-trillion-reckoning-in-latest-trial-over-social-...
1•benkan•10m ago•0 comments

The End-State Fallacy: Where Is AI Security Headed?

https://endstatefallacy.com/
1•mp3il•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Amz-CLI – A command line for Amazon

https://github.com/tamnd/amz-cli
1•tamnd•13m ago•0 comments

Creator of TypeScript: 10x Faster TypeScript, Why AI Won't Replace SWEs [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cywK3XYYJ2o
1•tosh•18m ago•0 comments

Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

https://pixelcluster.dev/VRAM-Overcommit/
1•flaburgan•22m ago•0 comments

YouTube: A view counts from the first frame

https://www.heise.de/en/news/YouTube-A-view-counts-from-the-first-frame-11416784.html
1•Topfi•24m ago•0 comments

AI is like farming. (and the purpose behind what I'm building)

2•Ozzie-D•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Lilo – a lightweight Markdown notes app built with Rust and egui

https://github.com/HellterEnjoy/Lilo
1•HellterEnjoy•26m ago•0 comments

LLMs Aren't Writing

https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/08/llms-arent-writing/
1•cesarrg•29m ago•0 comments

Linux follows Windows and makes a CPU feature requirement mandatory

https://www.neowin.net/news/linux-finally-follows-windows-and-makes-a-cpu-feature-requirement-man...
1•XzetaU8•31m ago•1 comments

When Search Eats the Web: A Model of Corpus Erosion Under Generative Extraction

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15896
1•p4bl0•33m ago•0 comments

Climbing the Wrong Hill (2009)

https://cdixon.org/2009/09/19/climbing-the-wrong-hill/
2•tosh•34m ago•0 comments

Harvesting coldness and solar energy for cooling,electricity, and heating

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(26)00398-X
1•wolfi1•35m ago•0 comments

git git git git git

https://caiustheory.com/git-git-git-git-git/
32•alexmolas•38m ago•7 comments

Debating the role of large language models in the kernel community

https://lwn.net/Articles/1083275/
1•pykello•39m ago•0 comments

Rethinking Database Programming

https://acadia.engineering/blog/rethinking-database-programming
4•honungsburk•45m ago•1 comments

Is Cloudflare reporting abuse system flawed?

2•tuxone•47m ago•0 comments

PurgeHound – Use the power of local LLM to declutter a Maildir folder

https://git.cerberusgames.ca/Starstreak/PurgeHound/
1•QBasicBitch•47m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ClassicalBot – Classical Concerts Database

https://classicalbot.com/
1•druskacik•52m ago•0 comments

Finger: Social network that never died

https://en.andros.dev/blog/54572bc7/finger-the-1971-social-network-that-never-died/
3•andros•52m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Lteee gives you a little thing to spark joy every day

https://lteee.app/
2•niklasmerz•57m ago•0 comments

A harness for long-term memory that suppresses context window saturation

https://zenodo.org/records/21990589
1•NegativeAbsence•1h ago•0 comments

Chess in a box. [X,Y,Z]

https://www.chesss.xyz
2•niksda•1h ago•1 comments