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awkii | 1 year ago

What is it about React that you hate? React has been the near defacto framework for frontend development for a decade now [1]. Like it or not, it's not going away anytime soon.

[1] https://2023.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-framewo...

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FractalHQ|1 year ago

As a Svelte / vanilla TS dev, I hate React because looking at it makes me feel like I’m drowning in obtuse, leaky abstractions, none of which feel necessary and all of which are required to do _anything_ at all.

recursive|1 year ago

Another react hater here. Here are some of my beefs.

  * Components don't have exposed identities, but component state is based on identity.  Secretly they're fibers.
  * Everything is treated as if it's immutable.  Reference equality is used to infer no changes.  Working with array-based state, or almost anything really, is awkward and unnecessarily verbose.  Spread all the things.
  * The rules of hooks.  These are just implementation constraints based on the rest of the design decisions of react.
  * You can't use symbols as keys.  This is small, but particularly irksome for me.
  * The smallest unit of UI change is the component render function.
  * Effect dependencies need to be listed explicitly.
There are more.

apsurd|1 year ago

> Everything is treated as if it's immutable [...]

Immutability is a great callout; frontend ecosystem is quite divisive on it.

For my flavor, as React exploded, redux and the advanced state management frameworks came and made everything bananas[1]. "It solves real problems for advanced apps"; maybe but I could never shake that these problems are self-inflicted.

There's a mathematical functional purity that's nerd-snipe worthy; but reactivity with mutation observers just seems to model the real world of UIs better.

Anyway, https://mobx.js.org/README.html is the exact opposite take: mutate your state! Subscribe to changes to your heart's content.

The divisiveness is real, it's what makes staying up to date exhausting.

[1] Come on, no one seriously thinks "bind action creators" made intuitive, ergonomic sense.