You're being downvoted but it's wild how frontend frameworks pop up, take hold, and then quietly disappear with the next iteration of the same thing with different syntactic sugar.
I downvoted it. I did so because, IMO, the comment is superfluous noise seen on every js thread. A tool exists to solve a problem, if you don't understand why it was built or don't like it, that's ok, but the hackneyed complaining about open source software merely existing deserves to be at the bottom of the thread.
I'm not the grandparent poster but I'll ask the question in a non-superflous way:
Is this actually better than Webpack and esbuild/Parcel/Rollup/whatever that came before it? Or is it just another opinionated way of packaging stuff up that's faster because it doesn't support 10% of the feature set the other tools do yet?
Looking at the "Why Vite" page, most of the blurbs are basically saying "Existing tools are slow". Well, I bet those existing tools are probably capable of doing 10x of what Vite can do currently. And how much faster IS Vite when bundling a large project? Nothing on that, only some charts with lines saying that they do it differently. They say 10-100x speedup on "prebundling", but if that part of the build is only a small portion of the overall build it might be negligible. Also, they say it's faster because Go. Well I kind of like the dogfooding of all the build tools for JS being written in JS - why introduce a whole new ecosystem here?
Not trying to be a naysayer here, I'm just asking why mindshare should be devoted to yet another project that looks like reinvention of the wheel and starting the cycle anew again when we could instead contribute mindshare to existing mature projects - the reasoning given on the site doesn't seem to be very compelling.
Js is an ever changing mass of stuff. I feel bad for frontend guys for this reason. Always writing for a language that does not even exist... always changing how you shove it all together.
Even worse as soon as you put a foot down and pick something you are behind.
It is exhausting even to watch much less to be in it.
Yeah it's just wild. I don't ever remember seeing this level of.... sideways.... churn before. Feels like it's been absolute mayhem for close to ten years now.
I thought that for sure, by 2017 or so, we'd have seen a relatively long lived consensus winner like we saw during jQuery's reign.
Instead, it's just been constant roiling.
The roiling is hard to understand because it's not like the other parts of the stack are really mutating that quickly. Backend dev practices/technologies and browser capabilities are not evolving or roiling at anywhere close to this rate. This sort of churn would have made sense during say 1997-2002 when the entire stack was being invented and reinvented and the basic idea of browsers themselves were changing rapidly.
I think it's an obvious truth that too little innovation/choice is bad. I don't think you'll find any arguments there!
Is there a point where too much of it becomes harmful? For close to ten years now, I feel that experienced and inexperienced devs alike have been confused and repulsed by the utter state of constant wheel-reinvention in the frontend space.
(Perhaps to my own detriment, I've focused on backend work because I'm waiting for the front-end situation to stabilize. Which of course may never happen. Maybe "full-stack dev" is something that will wind up in the history bin next to "webmaster")
It’s easier for some to just be prescribed a specific SDK.
This is a little bit insulting. Nobody wants to "be prescribed a specific SDK" - there's a large middle ground between that, and the current situation which has been chaotic for nearly a whole generation.
I think the situation with backend frameworks is sort of what many would like to see. Django, Rails, Express, etc. No shortage of choice and there is innovation. Yet I don't think anybody would call it chaotic. For me that is a happy middle ground.
Javascript UI frameworks last longer the Microsoft UI frameworks. It's not like a newer framework is just replacing an old one because of hype. React/Vue are massive improvements over Angular 1.
To be completely fair, changes occur way too often even when the name doesn't change. I tried to find a nice component library for starting out with Vue after not doing any frontend or JavaScript in years (I kind of quit when JSPM, the package manager, was hot).
It took me about an hour to figure out nothing I tried to set up worked because I had installed Vue 3 and mostly everything else was still on Vue 2.
Reminds me of Angular 2 rewriting their router every 6 weeks - to the point that they just moved on to calling it Angular 3 at release to rid themselves of the information on StackOverflow that was in a constant state of deprecation.
Which web framework has been the frontrunner for 7 years? jQuery?
According to the latest Stack Overflow survey[0], the most popular is React, which hasn't been the top for the last 7 years. And I wouldn't call jQuery the obvious choice before that, as it's been consistently fading in popularity.
root_axis|3 years ago
SOLAR_FIELDS|3 years ago
Is this actually better than Webpack and esbuild/Parcel/Rollup/whatever that came before it? Or is it just another opinionated way of packaging stuff up that's faster because it doesn't support 10% of the feature set the other tools do yet?
Looking at the "Why Vite" page, most of the blurbs are basically saying "Existing tools are slow". Well, I bet those existing tools are probably capable of doing 10x of what Vite can do currently. And how much faster IS Vite when bundling a large project? Nothing on that, only some charts with lines saying that they do it differently. They say 10-100x speedup on "prebundling", but if that part of the build is only a small portion of the overall build it might be negligible. Also, they say it's faster because Go. Well I kind of like the dogfooding of all the build tools for JS being written in JS - why introduce a whole new ecosystem here?
Not trying to be a naysayer here, I'm just asking why mindshare should be devoted to yet another project that looks like reinvention of the wheel and starting the cycle anew again when we could instead contribute mindshare to existing mature projects - the reasoning given on the site doesn't seem to be very compelling.
tonetheman|3 years ago
Js is an ever changing mass of stuff. I feel bad for frontend guys for this reason. Always writing for a language that does not even exist... always changing how you shove it all together.
Even worse as soon as you put a foot down and pick something you are behind.
It is exhausting even to watch much less to be in it.
JohnBooty|3 years ago
I thought that for sure, by 2017 or so, we'd have seen a relatively long lived consensus winner like we saw during jQuery's reign.
Instead, it's just been constant roiling.
The roiling is hard to understand because it's not like the other parts of the stack are really mutating that quickly. Backend dev practices/technologies and browser capabilities are not evolving or roiling at anywhere close to this rate. This sort of churn would have made sense during say 1997-2002 when the entire stack was being invented and reinvented and the basic idea of browsers themselves were changing rapidly.
Waterluvian|3 years ago
But it’s wonderfully healthy for an environment to be so alive and full of innovation.
Bazaar vs. Cathedral and whatnot. It’s easier for some to just be prescribed a specific SDK.
JohnBooty|3 years ago
I think it's an obvious truth that too little innovation/choice is bad. I don't think you'll find any arguments there!
Is there a point where too much of it becomes harmful? For close to ten years now, I feel that experienced and inexperienced devs alike have been confused and repulsed by the utter state of constant wheel-reinvention in the frontend space.
(Perhaps to my own detriment, I've focused on backend work because I'm waiting for the front-end situation to stabilize. Which of course may never happen. Maybe "full-stack dev" is something that will wind up in the history bin next to "webmaster")
This is a little bit insulting. Nobody wants to "be prescribed a specific SDK" - there's a large middle ground between that, and the current situation which has been chaotic for nearly a whole generation.I think the situation with backend frameworks is sort of what many would like to see. Django, Rails, Express, etc. No shortage of choice and there is innovation. Yet I don't think anybody would call it chaotic. For me that is a happy middle ground.
mmargerum|3 years ago
sascha_sl|3 years ago
It took me about an hour to figure out nothing I tried to set up worked because I had installed Vue 3 and mostly everything else was still on Vue 2.
Reminds me of Angular 2 rewriting their router every 6 weeks - to the point that they just moved on to calling it Angular 3 at release to rid themselves of the information on StackOverflow that was in a constant state of deprecation.
steve_taylor|3 years ago
mtlynch|3 years ago
According to the latest Stack Overflow survey[0], the most popular is React, which hasn't been the top for the last 7 years. And I wouldn't call jQuery the obvious choice before that, as it's been consistently fading in popularity.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-popular-...
fomine3|3 years ago