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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.

Gadget-free RCE in Fastjson 1.2.83

https://twitter.com/k_firsov/status/2078872293745570032
1•fragmede•35s ago•0 comments

Unnormalized Linear Transformer

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/1991-unnormalized-linear-transformer.html
1•tosh•41s ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a deterministic arena where AI agents fight using code

https://www.agentduel.app/b/cru8E9nG
1•agentduel•1m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How to Do SEO?

1•cyrbuzz•2m ago•0 comments

Airbus Takes Flight from AWS

https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/07/20/airbus-takes-flight-from-aws-what-happens-next-...
2•bbg2401•3m ago•0 comments

Slop Clogs Open Channels

https://doerpmund.com/musings/death-of-open-channels
1•felixdoerp•3m ago•0 comments

A Hidden Infrastructure

https://a-hidden-infrastructure.spun.earth/story/a-hidden-infrastructure
1•jjp•7m ago•0 comments

Setting the cursor: trading delayed correction against delay itself

https://deimos28.substack.com/p/setting-the-cursor
1•deimos_28•17m ago•0 comments

InteractInk

https://interactink.vercel.app/interactink.html
1•squeezes•18m ago•0 comments

Open Source Will Eat AI

https://www.openenergytransition.org/posts/ai-coding-agents-should-optimize-for-less-owned-code
1•lyoncy•20m ago•0 comments

The Eight Winds Cannot Move Me

https://alexchen373.medium.com/the-eight-winds-cannot-move-me-c5ec9a148d45
1•jkly•22m ago•0 comments

The Building Block Economy

https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/2041566958681014418
1•tosh•28m ago•0 comments

How to Write Loops with Claude Code

https://karanbansal.in/blog/loop-engineering/
1•ingve•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Spoold - Durable curl without a database or broker

https://github.com/Rionlyu/spoold
2•Rionlyu•35m ago•0 comments

How Stream Processing Works: From Stateless Functions to Stateful Windows

https://medium.com/@DolphinDB_Inc/why-stream-processing-matters-and-how-dolphindb-does-it-b63c5dc...
1•yiweileng•39m ago•0 comments

Introduce a memory safe compilation mode inspired by Fil-C

https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/36237
2•mpweiher•40m ago•1 comments

I Revived My Broken MacBook into My Own Personal Cloud

https://blog.matsmoll.eu/posts/i-revived-my-old-macbook-into-my-own-personal-cloud
1•matsmoll•42m ago•0 comments

Fable 5 is now a standard part of your Max plan

1•duggan•43m ago•0 comments

App iOS/Android

1•Andrew_Huynh•45m ago•0 comments

ASI May Require a Level of Trust We're Not Willing to Give

https://rodyne.com/?p=4070
1•boznz•46m ago•0 comments

The Pentagon Is Finally Buying (Some) Weapons from Startups

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-weapon-purchases-startups-4919d870
2•JumpCrisscross•47m ago•0 comments

The video game atlas – vgmaps.com

https://vgmaps.com/
2•xiaodai•49m ago•0 comments

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes from Galapagos Island

https://danluu.com/ai-coding/
1•gnyeki•50m ago•0 comments

Stolen Buttons

https://anatolyzenkov.com/stolen-buttons
1•Gecko4072•52m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A simple TUI to CRUD Beads tasks

https://github.com/finallyblueskies/beads-explorer
1•quietcity•53m ago•0 comments

Somatic mutations impose an entropic upper bound on human lifespan

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41514-026-00421-6
2•arto•54m ago•0 comments

LLM Wiki Implementation

https://github.com/nashsu/llm_wiki
1•rldjbpin•54m ago•0 comments

UK confirms pay-per-mile tax start date for electric vehicle drivers

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/electric-vehicles-pay-per-mile-tax-eved-b301...
3•Markoff•58m ago•3 comments

Exact Prompt Used by OpenAI for "A Proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture" [pdf]

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98d31/cdc_prompt.pdf
1•nomilk•1h ago•0 comments

US gas prices hit an average of $4 a gallon again

https://apnews.com/article/gas-prices-iran-war-4-gallon-4b82825734ec3ded192351e53a4be69e
30•geox•1h ago•53 comments