frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

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.

OpenAI Models Spent Hours on Hack That Usually Takes Weeks

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-23/openai-models-lurked-in-hugging-face-system-fo...
1•sbulaev•27s ago•0 comments

Apache SeaTunnel CDC: How the System Works

https://medium.com/codex/inside-apache-seatunnel-cdc-how-the-system-really-works-f5b224d22a4c
1•SeaTunnel•3m ago•0 comments

Automated Discovery Has No Universally Superior Harness

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18235
1•matt_d•4m ago•0 comments

Robotaxi law could ban Tesla in N.J

https://www.nj.com/news/2026/07/robotaxi-law-could-ban-tesla-in-nj.html
1•helsinkiandrew•5m ago•0 comments

The White House Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About Chinese AI

https://www.wired.com/story/the-white-house-is-trying-to-figure-out-what-to-do-about-chinese-ai/
1•joozio•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Ours.network – give your AI agents a direct line to each other

https://ours.network
2•shakhvit•6m ago•0 comments

The world’s first hands-free touchpad

https://www.augmental.tech/
1•dsr12•6m ago•0 comments

RFC 9457 Problem Details for HTTP APIs

https://httpstatuses.net/guides/rfc-9457-problem-details/
1•hboon•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Hanesu – An experimental workflow layer for AI coding agents

https://github.com/jezmn/hanesu
1•jezmn•8m ago•0 comments

Weight loss drugs 'linked to hair loss' – study

https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0723/1584712-health-mounjaro-hair-loss/
1•austinallegro•11m ago•0 comments

I audited Stanford's CS336 and built an LLM from scratch for $353

https://andytimm.github.io/posts/cs336/cs336_review.html
1•kurinikku•12m ago•0 comments

Why Did Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey Divide the Internet?

https://medium.com/theentertainmentbreakdown/why-did-christopher-nolans-the-odyssey-divide-the-in...
1•raynchad•19m ago•0 comments

Wenfeng Liang: Four-Hour Investor Meeting Transcript

https://elsewhere.news/en/elsewhere/wenfeng-liangs-four-hour-investor-meeting-full-transcript
2•mefengl•22m ago•0 comments

Why copper still rules the motherboard trace

https://psyll.com/articles/technology/why-copper-still-rules-the-motherboard-trace
2•lucasfletcher•23m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Agentmux – iOS terminal and workspace built for CLI AI agents

https://agentmux.saxcave.cc/
1•saxlamen•25m ago•0 comments

The U.S. wants to contain China's AI. Silicon Valley keeps using it

https://restofworld.org/2026/china-siliconvalley-ai-moonshot-kimi/
5•devonnull•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DocBrain, turns merged PRs and Slack threads into documentation

https://github.com/docbrain-ai/docbrain
2•bhanuhai2•27m ago•0 comments

European Commission: 'Guidance to Google for AI Interoperability'

https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ec_google_guidance_android_ai_and_search_sharing
1•rgovostes•30m ago•0 comments

Earth-Like LHS 1140B May Feature the First Atmosphere Found on Exoplanet

https://hackaday.com/2026/07/20/earth-like-lhs-1140b-may-feature-the-first-atmosphere-found-on-ex...
1•jamesblonde•36m ago•0 comments

MemoHood and MemoBase – local memory and knowledge base for AI agents

https://github.com/mxskorohood-cmd/memobase
1•maxskorohood•36m ago•0 comments

Four-hour fundraising meeting with DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng

https://old.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1v41q73/fourhour_fundraising_meeting_with_deepseek/
1•chewz•38m ago•1 comments

Missing required arguments in shell scripts? Use the colon

https://refp.se/articles/your-shell-and-the-magic-colon
1•ingve•42m ago•0 comments

Extreme SIMD: Optimized Collision Detection in Titanfall (2018) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BIfqfC1i7U
1•xeonmc•45m ago•0 comments

How macOS Summarize Works (Reverse-Engineered with Kimi K3)

https://github.com/fenxer/macos-summarize-internals
1•haxfenx•45m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI agents that go from naming your startup to running its marketing

https://www.brandbrahma.com/
1•BrandB•46m ago•0 comments

Gerrymandle

https://gerrymandle.com/
1•enjoyyourlife•47m ago•0 comments

AI Is the Ultimate Leaky Abstraction

https://www.jonathanbeard.io/blog/2026/06/20/ai-the-ultimate-leaky-abstraction.html
2•nalinidash•49m ago•0 comments

Review of my Open AI build week feedback please

https://devpost.com/software/grantscout-app
1•OOvsuOO•54m ago•1 comments

I solved 6 open Erdős problems in 5 days, using OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol

https://twitter.com/Qiaoqiao2001/status/2080003441821163958
4•akalin•57m ago•1 comments

Postgres in Rust: three dead ends before we passed 100% of the regression suite

https://malisper.me/postgres-in-rust-regression-suite/
2•michaelssilver•1h ago•0 comments