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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.

Mark Bennett on Using Claude Code for Application Development

https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2025/12/11/mark-bennett-on-using-claude-code-for-application-develo...
1•skmurphy•1m ago•0 comments

Why Everyone Is a DJ Now

https://kottke.org/25/12/this-is-why-everyone-is-a-dj-now
1•sieste•2m ago•0 comments

Amazon pulls AI recap from Fallout TV show after it made several mistakes

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r77j5nze5o
2•speckx•3m ago•0 comments

Socialism AI: A historic advance in the political education of the working class

https://ai.wsws.org/en
1•K7PJP•5m ago•1 comments

The choice between Rust and C-derived languages is not only about memory safety

https://bbuyukliev.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-choice-between-rust-and-c-derived.html
1•bluetomcat•6m ago•0 comments

Advice on Raising Seed Capital?

https://gotchafinder.ai
1•FWKevents•8m ago•1 comments

VMware kills vSphere Foundation in parts of EMEA

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/11/vmware_kills_vsphere_foundation_parts_emea/
1•abdelhousni•10m ago•0 comments

Pre-PEP: Rust for CPython

https://discuss.python.org/t/pre-pep-rust-for-cpython/104906
2•BiteCode_dev•12m ago•0 comments

Remote Code Execution on a $1B Legal AI Tool

https://www.promptarmor.com/resources/casebreak-ai-phishing-and-rce-in-vlex
6•skcheetah•14m ago•0 comments

GNU Unifont

https://unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html
15•remywang•16m ago•2 comments

Noah Palansky Found PMF and the Road to a Successful Series A Raise [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UzJ4_EOl1g
1•rchachra•19m ago•0 comments

Tesla US sales drop to nearly 4-year low in November

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-us-sales-drop-nearly-3-year-low-novem...
2•doener•20m ago•0 comments

Can something artificial create something real [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3hzuCLjQVo
1•rchachra•22m ago•0 comments

AI based hacking compared to humans

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09882
1•mriguy•25m ago•0 comments

Early-stage growth ideas for a new product-discovery app?

1•bazenda•26m ago•0 comments

The Yoneda Perspective: Systems Defined by Their Interfaces

https://ibrahimcesar.cloud/blog/categorical-solutions-architect-part-3/
1•ibrahimcesar•26m ago•0 comments

Letting the mind wander may aid passive learning

https://www.psypost.org/neuroscientists-discover-that-letting-the-mind-wander-may-aid-passive-lea...
2•sundarurfriend•28m ago•0 comments

Democracy in the Workplace: Co-ops [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQMZR64G_eM
1•oldfuture•30m ago•1 comments

macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-26_2-release-notes#RDMA-over-...
4•guiand•32m ago•0 comments

Testing a cheaper laminar flow hood

https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/testing-a-cheaper-laminar-flow-hood
1•surprisetalk•33m ago•0 comments

Do Not Optimize Away

https://matklad.github.io/2025/12/09/do-not-optimize-away.html
2•surprisetalk•33m ago•0 comments

Smol share – for sharing ephemeral encrypted snippets of text or links

https://cblgh.org/smolshare/
2•surprisetalk•33m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What is your go-to breakfast?

3•schmuckonwheels•35m ago•4 comments

The Swatting Database / Leo [pdf]

https://vault.fbi.gov/fbi-swatting-database-final/fbi-swatting-database-final.pdf/at_download/file
1•sans_souse•36m ago•0 comments

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Collection of Astronomy Simulations & Animations

https://astro.unl.edu/animationsLinks.html
1•NaOH•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Verani – Socket.io-like realtime SDK for Cloudflare

https://github.com/v0id-user/verani
3•v0id_user•43m ago•0 comments

Opus 4.5 yields the best precision of any model tested for code review

https://blog.macroscope.com/blog/opus-4.5-code-review
3•curiouska•44m ago•0 comments

Security issues with electronic invoices

https://invoice.secvuln.info/
22•todsacerdoti•45m ago•9 comments

A Stable Eyelid Angle Metric for Driver Drowsiness Detection, Data Augmentation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19519
1•PaulHoule•45m ago•0 comments

The Line Between Good and Evil

https://thinkhuman.com/the-line-between-good-and-evil/
1•jamesgill•46m ago•0 comments