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nickreese | 1 year ago

We were an early adopter and sponsor of Tamagui. Impressive tech but massively unstable even on minor version bumps. We even had a core team member working on the project and the breakage was every version. Lost more than 6 months of time relying on it. Ultimately we killed the project because of the decision to go with Tamagui. Just an FYI for those considering this. Abstractions on unstable abstractions is a good way to hate your project.

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seec|1 year ago

I feel sorry for your problems, but to be honest I'm reading the discussion here to understand what others think and who exactly can buy in that sort of "too good to be true" ideal solution.

Because to me it just looks like another shiny thing that tries to be everything to everyone and ends up doing nothing good. They seem to be good salesmen, but less competent devs, at least when it comes to creating real innovation, not repacking old code/ideas.

I'm saying that because, both of their websites are so bad that they create problems in Chrome, something that is rather rare nowadays with an adblocker; the Tamagui one repeatedly eats memory and crash in tab and the One seem to have some rendering issues.

It did not investigate because I don't really care, but I'll say it doesn't inspire confidence at all and in my opinion, it is largely enough evidence to dismiss the whole thing as a toy project of semi competent devs.

In another comment, I have seen you drop the hypocrisy and be a bit mad about the support you gave for disappointing results. I think the one you are the maddest at is yourself, because you feel you should have known and to be honest, you probably should have. But we all learn everyday...

nwienert|1 year ago

That's a mean thing to say, but shows you lack the ability to judge skill. I've been doing this for a long time at the highest level, and I love doing it so I take care.

Our websites both get very high performance scores and if you profile them neither of them does anything at idle. Tamagui site does a ton of fun animations to show off how well it works, it's possible if you're on Linux or Windows with certain drivers causing issues, mind telling me any of that info?

I'm an old school web developer, I've spent a lot of time on performance. I'm proud of the sites, they weren't easy to pull off. I checked in Chrome again just now and things feel very smooth, and I don't see memory runaway. Do you have any other extensions?

mbforbes|1 year ago

This comment single-handedly made me do an enthusiasm 180. I'd find it helpful if the developers responded to it.

Just to give a bit more meat to my comment: these experiences are really helpful when you're in the position to adopt a potential time-saving (stack-cutting/unifying) technology. I find I get a huge benefit from word-of-moth experiences from others who have tried such frameworks. Specifically compared to takes on the _idea_ of the technology.

nwienert|1 year ago

I responded in a sibling comment.

nwienert|1 year ago

Im sorry to hear that. Tamagui is one of the biggest projects you’ll find in terms of scope - it’s not one library, it’s over 200, and it’s targeting 4 platforms, 4 JS engines, and has a featureset that is unmatched.

So I don’t think it’s surprising if you have regressions when upgrading 200+ packages for any project, and I also don’t think you should upgrade it honestly more than once every six months.

Second point is that we also moved (and had to move) much faster than a typical project. Because we had so many packages and were solving very hard problems, we had a lot of ground to cover. We never broke any API surfaces in a minor or patch, but we weren’t afraid to improve our underlying code because if we didn’t, on a project of that scale, we’d have quickly succumb to tech debt. A good chunk of our UI kit was under the “beta” tag until recently.

That said I’ll take responsibility for it. I wonder when this was that you adopted it, I think we’ve gotten a lot better over time as things have stabilized. We stopped adding features over a year ago now, and have entirely focused on stability, performance and documentation since.

A final note is that I have never been full-time on Tamagui, it’s always been a side project of mine while I had a full time job. We have a large test suite, but again, the surface area of the project is simply massive.

Now that I am full time on One and Tamagui, I am looking forward to proving that we know what we’re doing. We’ve hired great developers and have greatly expanded testing even just in the last few months.

One is a lot simpler than Tamagui. Like… not 10x simpler, closer to 1000x simpler. I keep telling people: a universal framework is surprisingly simple compared to a universal style library + UI kit.

Editing to add one more point of context. One of the best and pickiest developers I know - Fernando Rojo - has been using Tamagui since the beginning. He even wrote his own style library before Tamagui. He recently started on a new side project that he wants to turn into a real venture down the road, and he is using Tamagui for it. It’s actually one of my most proud accomplishments. It’s an extremely strong signal imo, as someone who is known for NIH and being very picky to choose such a big dependency like Tamagui again.

nickreese|1 year ago

Nate - We discussed the issues extensively on discord and you even did a video call with me and my team. The entire core theming structure changed multiple times and worked with Eshan (which you represented as being a great developer and contributor to Tamagui) to solve the issues… just to have them break again on a minor version for you to release takeout. Having donated over $1,000 to the project and spent a ton of time in the discord and messaged with you more than a handful of times I feel like this comment isn’t genuine but is to save face on HN.

rlt|1 year ago

> Tamagui is one of the biggest projects you’ll find in terms of scope - it’s not one library, it’s over 200, and it’s targeting 4 platforms, 4 JS engines, and has a featureset that is unmatched.

Tamagui is impressive, but TBH it's sounding like this is a bug, not a feature.

> So I don’t think it’s surprising if you have regressions when upgrading 200+ packages for any project, and I also don’t think you should upgrade it honestly more than once every six months.

In my experience it gets exponentially harder to upgrade packages the longer you let them get out of date.

account_created|1 year ago

I am also an early adopter of Tamagui and can say that documentation has gone much better than it was before, but still needs lots of improvements. I myself struggle with many packages we have installed with Tamagui, and at this point I don't know which one to keep and which can be removed.