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The Business Case for Vanilla JavaScript

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250430.html
6•LAC-Tech•12mo ago

Comments

copypaper•12mo 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•12mo ago
What benefits of a framework?

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

proc0•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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.

Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models [pdf]

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.12.675911v1.full.pdf
1•thunderbong•7m ago•0 comments

Built a safety-first options automation tool for covered calls

1•jansonlau•16m ago•0 comments

Why cars charge 5x faster in China when the research is shared?

https://cyrusradfar.com/thoughts/why-cars-charge-5x-faster-in-china/
2•cyrusradfar•22m ago•0 comments

America's Pandemic Car Bubble Is Now Trapping Buyers in Debt

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/car-owners-debt-negative-equity-3cfcd031
2•JumpCrisscross•23m ago•0 comments

Our Principles

https://openai.com/index/our-principles/
1•salkahfi•37m ago•0 comments

A New Idea to Save the Climate? Dam the Bering Strait.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/climate/amoc-bering-strait-dam.html
2•bookofjoe•40m ago•1 comments

Sabastian Sawe becomes first person to break two-hour marathon mark

https://www.rte.ie/sport/athletics/2026/0426/1570275-sawe-becomes-first-man-to-break-two-hour-mar...
2•austinallegro•43m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Nitrum – Rust Toolkit and CLI for AWS Nitro Enclaves

https://github.com/matzapata/nitrum
2•matzapata•44m ago•1 comments

I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Coding with AI

https://jeffield.net/blog/claude-strangelove-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-coding-wi...
1•jsheffie•45m ago•0 comments

The Atari 1200XL – By Paul Lefebvre

https://www.goto10retro.com/p/inside-the-atari-1200xl
1•rbanffy•45m ago•0 comments

Did You Say "Intellectual Property"? It's a Seductive Mirage

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.en
2•MontyCarloHall•48m ago•0 comments

FreeBSD Device Drivers Book

https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book
1•myth_drannon•49m ago•0 comments

Jaeger adopts OpenTelemetry at its core to solve the AI agent observability gap

https://thenewstack.io/jaeger-v2-ai-observability/
1•Brajeshwar•50m ago•0 comments

Intel reportedly says it boosted yields by selling what would normally be scrap

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-reportedly-says-it-boosted-yields-by-sellin...
2•rbanffy•51m ago•0 comments

The tortoise and the hare: will China beat the US in the race back to the moon?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/26/china-us-space-race-moon
3•pseudolus•53m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CheckThisOut – a filtered directory of side hustles and AI tools

https://checkthisout.com/
1•mbahlitz•55m ago•0 comments

SnakeBreak [a Browser Extension Game]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snakebreak/
1•programmexxx•57m ago•1 comments

VPinFE – Cross-platform Front end for VPinball

https://github.com/superhac/vpinfe
1•terry107•1h ago•0 comments

JQuake – monitor real-time shaking events in Japan

https://jquake.net/en/
1•pndy•1h ago•0 comments

Statistical Structure and the Evolution of Languages

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2068/20252374/481270/Statistical-structure-an...
1•Anon84•1h ago•0 comments

The Spinor Genus and the Distinguishing Lattice Isomorphism Problem(2024)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1475
1•rolph•1h ago•0 comments

NSF science advisory board fired by Trump administration

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01361-7
2•rguiscard•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Out Loud – open-source desktop TTS app for macOS/Windows/Linux

https://github.com/light-cloud-com/out-loud
2•julia-kafarska•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Logic Designer – Webapp

https://logic-designer.github.io/logic-designer-main/
2•logic-designer•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Startup Equity Adventure Game

https://options-game-polymathrobotics.pythonanywhere.com/
7•iliabara•1h ago•3 comments

CIOs struggle to find clarity in their organizations' AI strategies

https://www.cio.com/article/4162949/cios-struggle-to-find-clarity-in-their-organizations-ai-strat...
3•WaitWaitWha•1h ago•0 comments

DeepSeek drops input cache price to 1/10th

https://xcancel.com/deepseek_ai/status/2048440764368347611
5•alecco•1h ago•1 comments

The curious case of Sean Plankey's derailed CISA nomination

https://www.csoonline.com/article/4162801/the-curious-case-of-sean-plankeys-derailed-cisa-nominat...
2•WaitWaitWha•1h ago•0 comments

High energy sports drinks boost performance even if you spit them out

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/apr/15/high-energy-carbohydrate-drinks-performance-brain
6•bwoah•1h ago•1 comments

US Navy tests laser weapon that shoots down drones on the USS George H.W. Bush

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/us-navy-tests-laser-weapon-that-shoots-down-drones-on-...
3•rbanffy•1h ago•0 comments