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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.

Account Deactivated Due to Biological Research

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1wd5kpp/account_deactivated_due_to_biological_research/
1•bithammerthunde•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: VideoHighlighter – offline self-hosted video analyzer

https://github.com/Aseiel/VideoHighlighter
2•Aseiel•5m ago•0 comments

Why is a Nix rollback just a symlink flip?

https://www.labcraft.dev/blog/nix-profiles-generations
2•anandsuresh•8m ago•0 comments

Veilid for Everyone

https://veilid.com/why-use-veilid/
2•Bluestein•10m ago•0 comments

Interpreting Pangram

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/14/interpreting-pangram/
2•swah•12m ago•0 comments

Autopoietic Ethics Constitution

https://www.guidavid.com/writing/autopoietic-ethics-constitution.txt
2•gdss•13m ago•0 comments

Personal Statement on AI Risk (Daniel Selsam, OpenAI capabilities)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQNl3SEX5IyA6d9qHjjFZN-qzGRZNFI6b63g-yu1Fy-ZYkVfCWm7i...
2•yurivish•14m ago•0 comments

Charts Built for Chat

https://dbtcharts.com/blog/charts-built-for-chat/
3•thingsilearned•14m ago•1 comments

One Android app. Why so many processes?

https://returnzero.dev/articles/one-android-app-why-so-many-processes
2•theanonymousone•14m ago•0 comments

Land Is Scarce, Just Burn Your Trash

https://www.governance.fyi/p/land-is-scarce-just-burn-your-trash
2•guardianbob•15m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: iOS 27 does not allow Apple Intelligence to be disabled

6•nunez•15m ago•0 comments

Echo: A shader editor shader editor

https://echo.hughsk.io/docs/reference
2•hughsk•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DevRecap – reconstruct what you worked on from Codex and Git

https://github.com/jquinteiroo/devrecap
3•jquint•18m ago•0 comments

O Empire Ward Off Thy Rot [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehPDch6mAFw
2•pusewicz•18m ago•0 comments

Nobody's safe from misaligned AI-not even the people building it

2•causal-alignmen•18m ago•0 comments

Not the Glue They Thought It Was

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/not-glue-they-thought-it-was
1•EA-3167•20m ago•0 comments

Mark Zuckerberg: A profile of history's largest non-territorial empire

https://colossus.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-profile/
1•IshanMi•21m ago•0 comments

DeepSeek Is Down

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash
2•dofi4ka•21m ago•0 comments

Why Beyond Vanilla RAG?

https://chandula7.gumroad.com/l/AgenticRAGFundamentals
3•lokizzz•21m ago•1 comments

A Single Firm Is Behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Hacking Scandals

https://www.effort.news/irregular
7•yusufozkan•22m ago•0 comments

Ollama 0.33.3 changed what prompt_eval_duration measures

https://lognebudo.github.io/llmxray/docs/en/articles/ollama-prefill-metrics.html
1•lognebudo•22m ago•0 comments

Fathom (YC W21) is being acquired by Superhuman

https://www.fathom.ai/superhuman
1•jorts•24m ago•1 comments

Personal Statement on AI Risk

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vQNl3SEX5IyA6d9qHjjFZN-qzGRZNFI6b63g-yu1Fy-ZYkVfC...
1•mellosouls•24m ago•1 comments

California lawmakers urge criminal penalties emergency legislation to rein in AI

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-09-13/rogue-ai-concerns-prompt-ca-lawmakers-to-dema...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•25m ago•0 comments

SWE-Bench Multimodal: Do AI Systems Generalize to Visual Software Domains?

https://www.swebench.com/multimodal.html
1•matt_d•28m ago•0 comments

New EU Repair Rules [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N66XA9UwaRA
1•franczesko•28m ago•0 comments

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3799902.3811095
1•ibobev•30m ago•0 comments

RoofLang: Enabling AI-Driven Architecting of LLM Inference Systems

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12551
2•matt_d•30m ago•0 comments

DLSS 5: Generative Neural Rendering

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/DLSS5/
1•ibobev•30m ago•0 comments

Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/26-1444/26-1444-2026-08-04.html
72•neom•31m ago•48 comments