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> React takes us forward in the sense that most of us don't want to go back to direct DOM manipulation There was recently a demo of what a Todo MVC app might l

> React takes us forward in the sense that most of us don't want to go back to direct DOM manipulation There was recently a demo of what a Todo MVC app might look like if written in vanilla JS with today's apis. It looks fairly decent; I could see myself going back to something like that: https://frontendmasters.com/blog/vanilla-javascript-todomvc/ https://frontendmasters.com/blog/vanilla-javascript-todomvc/

ravenstine 4y ago
It's definitely feasible and even pleasant to write a frontend app in vanilla JS, if it's relatively simple. I hate to be that guy, but... does it scale? Perhaps it can. I haven't really tried to write a large scale frontend app in vanilla that is similar in complexity to apps I've worked on that have millions of users. Maybe it's feasible, but it would take a lot of dedication to "do things right" by the developers on the team. Also, reactive templates pretty much kill any desire I would have to by relying on direct DOM calls. With something like React or Svelte alone, there's practically no disadvantage to using them even strictly for rendering besides added file size. With vanilla, it would take more effort to make things efficient because you don't necessarily just want to call render() whenever something changes. It's really nice having a templating system that allows you to change things surgically without doing a lot of extra work rerendering things that shouldn't actually change. However, I think vanilla JS rendering definitely has a place in terms of writing small, purposeful, modular components. Frameworks should make it straight forward to use vanilla components so that things that would be more succinct in vanilla can be written as such.