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The Business Case for Vanilla JavaScript

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250430.html
6•LAC-Tech•11mo ago

Comments

copypaper•11mo 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•11mo ago
What benefits of a framework?

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

proc0•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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.

The New Age of Performance Anxiety

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/04/screen-people-stage-fright-performance-anxiety/686803/
1•paulpauper•32s ago•0 comments

What It's Like to Live with an Experimental Brain Implant

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bci-user-experience
1•digital55•42s ago•0 comments

Wearable health tech might be Tim Cook's greatest legacy

https://www.theverge.com/tech/915976/tim-cook-john-ternus-apple-watch-health-tech-wearables
1•paulpauper•58s ago•0 comments

The Fossils 1969

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn1uhSS1cDo
1•indigodaddy•1m ago•0 comments

Amtrak's "1MB" National Route Map PDF Is a 574MB File

https://www.amtrak.com/train-routes
1•tech234a•1m ago•0 comments

Iconiq, Go-To Wealth Adviser for Tech's Elite, Is Putting Billions into AI

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-17/iconiq-advisor-to-tech-billionaires-emerges-as...
1•petethomas•1m ago•0 comments

The power keeping wages low

https://text.npr.org/g-s1-118071
1•mooreds•1m ago•0 comments

InvenTree: Open-source inventory management system with OpenAPI

https://github.com/inventree/InvenTree
1•matmair•3m ago•1 comments

Brex founder open sourced his stack for running the company through OpenClaw

https://github.com/brexhq/CrabTrap
1•ofabioroma•4m ago•1 comments

Cube Sandbox: Instant, Concurrent, Secure and Lightweight Sandbox for AI Agents

https://docs.cubesandbox.ai/
1•bpierre•4m ago•0 comments

Plastic film covered in tiny pillars can tear apart viruses on contact

https://theconversation.com/new-plastic-film-covered-in-thousands-of-tiny-pillars-can-tear-apart-...
2•geox•4m ago•0 comments

Privacy raised during teen social media ban tech trial were ignored

https://www.themandarin.com.au/311397-privacy-raised-during-teen-social-media-ban-tech-trial-were...
1•cdrnsf•5m ago•0 comments

OpenAI Shuts Down Sora AI? But Why?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w3e467ewqo
2•shockedstorys•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: FMQL – graph query and bulk-edit CLI for Markdown and YAML frontmatter

https://github.com/buyuk-dev/fmql
1•buyukdev•10m ago•1 comments

Retro Rewind – Video Store Simulator

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3552140/Retro_Rewind__Video_Store_Simulator/
1•doener•12m ago•0 comments

Can you spend $600K on B300 GPU Server? Which LLM will you run on this?

https://www.dihuni.com/
1•tech_curator•12m ago•0 comments

The Deskilling Paradox

https://signalintent.net/2026/04/21/the-deskilling-paradox/
1•tokonomy_dev•14m ago•0 comments

Lotus Wiper: a new threat targeting the energy and utilities sector

https://securelist.com/tr/lotus-wiper/119472/
1•campuscodi•14m ago•0 comments

Perry, a TypeScript compiler written in Rust that targets nine platforms

https://www.perryts.com/
1•bpierre•15m ago•0 comments

What Drives AI Crawler Traffic?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/68-million-ai-crawler-visits-show-what-drives-ai-search-visib...
1•restlessforge•15m ago•1 comments

NSA loads Anthropic Mythos cyberattack while Pentagon says it cannot

https://aitwerp.com/signals/nsa-cyberattack-consent-bypassed/
1•Inziu•17m ago•0 comments

Delegation as an OS Primitive

https://mz.attahri.com/posts/delegation-as-os-primitive/
1•mohamedattahri•19m ago•0 comments

Stop Paying the JSON Tax

https://columnar.tech/blog/stop-paying-the-json-tax//
1•ianmcook•20m ago•0 comments

Moving On

https://marcg.net/moving-on/
1•speckx•20m ago•1 comments

Google taps Sergey Brin to lead a specialized AI strike team to take on Claude

https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/google-taps-sergey-brin-to-lead-a-specialized-ai-strike-team...
1•rantingdemon•21m ago•0 comments

Mhdybnb

https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-warp/
1•mhdybnb•22m ago•0 comments

One unusual thing in SV is the topics of billboard ads

https://101ads.org/
3•mihaichiorean•22m ago•1 comments

U.S. Attorney's Office Filed 143 Border-Related Cases This Week

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/us-attorneys-office-filed-143-border-related-cases-week
1•737min•25m ago•1 comments

The Spitfire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6a9_bEebYM
1•fallinditch•25m ago•0 comments

Indianapolis councilman says shots fired at home and 'No Data Centers' note left

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/indianapolis-councilman-says-shots-fired-at-home-and-no-data-...
1•rmason•25m ago•0 comments