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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.

SatBleed: Security of Commoditized Communication Modules in Satellites

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06258
1•memorybadger•36s ago•0 comments

C for Rust Programmers

https://bd103.dev/blog/2026-10-07-c-for-rust-programmers/
1•torutofu•2m ago•0 comments

Driving an Nvidia GPU from a Hobby Rust Kernel: GSP-RM to Vulkan

https://github.com/oriaj-nocrala/rust_so_kernel/blob/master/docs/blog/gsp-to-vulkan.md
1•oriaj-nocrala•4m ago•0 comments

Every castle on Earth – an independent catalogue and world ranking

https://thousandcastles.com/
1•pronskiy•6m ago•0 comments

You click a PostHog survey. An attacker gets your whole account

https://www.strix.ai/blog/posthog-survey-account-takeover
6•bearsyankees•6m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is the xcancel source code publicly available?

2•bigwheels•8m ago•1 comments

The Engineering Behind Lagos Life

https://africanengineer.com/i/lagos-life
1•dominuskelvin•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Manifestack – open-source stack audit inside your coding agent

https://github.com/manifestack/manifestack
1•dminglv•9m ago•0 comments

I found an explanet using Claude, and now you can fly to it yourself

https://twitter.com/p_rabtsevich/status/2107803696058822742
1•bigwheels•10m ago•0 comments

Midterms 2026

https://midterms.graze.social
2•benwerd•10m ago•0 comments

Sexy werewolves, boy-toy mafiosos, homeless guys who are billionaires

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/magazine/microdramas-tv-shows-hollywood-entertainment.html
2•bongoman42•10m ago•0 comments

Nura (PostmarketOS): The road to daily-drivable mainline phones

https://nura.eco/blog/2026/09/29/road-to-main-category/
1•nizarmah•11m ago•0 comments

FeedbackBench: Coding agents ranked by their users' feedback

https://feedbackbench.com
4•kaushalvivek•12m ago•1 comments

I Priced Out Vibe-Coding a Copy of My $250 App

https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/what-it-costs-to-vibe-code-broadcast
1•drchiu•12m ago•0 comments

Ten days inside CVE-2026-88771: anatomy of a NetScaler exploitation wave

https://huntback.io/blog/cve-88771-analysis
1•noktec•12m ago•0 comments

Github Status - Incident with Git Operations, Issues, Actions and Pull Requests

https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/qpfv5p86dmrl
1•rodrodrod•12m ago•0 comments

Cloudflare Data, in DuckDB

https://query.farm/blog/query-cloudflare-from-duckdb/
1•rustyconover•14m ago•0 comments

Different Modes of Thinking

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/modes-of-thinking/
2•aray07•14m ago•0 comments

A thorium-229 optical nuclear clock with feedback loop

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11084-4
1•bushwart•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Terse, a Claude Code plugin that halves reply length by cutting filler

https://github.com/lowenbjer/claude-terse
2•lowenbjer•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: VoiceGremlin, a SaaS tool for automated tests against AI phone agents

https://voicegremlin.com/
1•ineptech•18m ago•0 comments

Dogs, devils, clams and catfish: When cancer is contagious

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/science-of-transmissible-cancers
1•knowablemag•19m ago•0 comments

Real-World Career Pivots for Software Engineers in 2026

https://spectrum.ieee.org/career-pivots-for-software-engineers
1•speckx•19m ago•0 comments

Git Refs

https://matklad.github.io/2026/10/07/git-ref.html
1•surprisetalk•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Pinrail – A desktop inbox where coding agents wait for your review

https://github.com/forgeplane/pinrail
1•pnezis•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Zesfy – Put your todo list directly inside calendar events

https://apps.apple.com/ph/app/daily-planner-zesfy/id6479947874
1•waitinside•20m ago•0 comments

Beating the Averages (2003)

https://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
1•compiler-guy•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A faithful recreation of the Plex UI for Jellyfin

https://github.com/iridium/jellex
1•microcode•21m ago•0 comments

EmDash uses Clef to moderate the plugin registry

https://emdashcms.com/blog/how-emdash-uses-clef-to-moderate-the-plugin-registry
2•ascorbic•22m ago•0 comments

LiquidAI D1 Decision Model

https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/d1-3B
3•andhuman•24m ago•0 comments