[leonardopainter]

This article points out how ridiculous React is. This is just a simple timer, yet there are so many things you can get wrong. This article doesn't seem to even clear the interval so it runs forever. Solid solves some problems, but I don't know why everything has to be reactive. I have never understood it, I just noticed that from knockoutjs onwards, every front-end framework was based on automatically updating views based on state.

I create a library at github.com/thebinarysearchtree/artwork. To be honest, I don't know if it is going to work or not. It is just javascript with no reactivity. When I rewrote a fairly typical large application that you would find at most corporations (not a giant tech company application), every component ended up being about 50% of the code of react, with excellent performance.

The problem I have with it that makes me uneasy is that ultimately you are creating content in JavaScript, which I don't think is ideal. The lack of HTML structure isn't a problem as devtools and so on show that. The problem is things like:

  const label = label('Email:');

I want the HTMLLabelElement variable to be called label... but that is the name of the function that creates it. Then there is the setText example on the github page... I just didn't want to write label.innerText.. h3.innerText... etc etc .innerText. Variadic arguments are not ideal though, and when you have lots of elements with lots of attributes, eg:

  const content = div({
    className: 'content',
    title: 'whatever',
    innerText: 'something'
  });
    

it doesn't look like art, which is the point of the library. It is just hard to create content with JavaScript and not really the tool for the job. If I could solve that, I would be very happy with the library. It kind of needs JSX, but then it is back to having the JSX variable auto-update the state and well.. I guess that is why knockout and so on do it. Maybe I could do just plain HTML without state.

So yeah, I don't know. I mean, it does end up being half the code. If you look at the todo example on my github page, and compare it to the one on React's homepage or solid's homepage, it is literally half the amount of code with native hand-written performance. This continues on to real-world components, it is just that.. I am a perfectionist I guess, and I want it to be elegant always.

anyway.. I haven't even finished writing the documentation.