3 ms·

The negative perception of Vercel in these comments is surprising to me. I'm not very familiar with them but was about to take my first dive, as I had been on N

The negative perception of Vercel in these comments is surprising to me. I'm not very familiar with them but was about to take my first dive, as I had been on Netlify but Vercel seems to offer much more functionality. Honest question - can anyone ELI5 why I should avoid them? The only concrete things I have seen are "they're exaggerating the 10x figure", and "they collect metrics and it's hard to turn it off". Both aren't great, but seems an overreach at first glance to avoid them for those reasons.

aniforprez 4y ago
I think I'm of the same mentality. IMO a lot of the comments here are histrionics that they misrepresented (and outright lied in some cases) the gap in efficiency of their tool. But it's still somewhat better than the existing tooling. All of this also has very little to do with Vercel as a product which is still pretty good and can run almost anything without needing to use their framework NextJS. I don't use Vercel myself and am perfectly content with Netlify which does what I need and more but I don't think any of this dissuades me from using Vercel Vercel simply has a lot of VC funding and is using marketing to sell their tooling and their platform. It's not unique to them, nor is it particularly egregious especially when Evan You himself clearly admits Turbopack is, in fact, slightly more performant than Vite. They lied about some benchmarks. Very dumb of them. I will move on and will not really avoid Vercel unless I have much more immediate concerns like their pricing or other ethics concerns that have more drastic effects
- apineda 4y ago
  I guess what irks people is when a big dog tries to gain "market share" with half truths, which may perhaps unjustly and negatively affect highly regarded open source efforts. I get that it sounds good though, better than "6% faster at the 30k module threshold".
brundolf 4y ago
You don't need to avoid them (at least their OSS projects). They mostly make good stuff. They just have an overzealous marketing department that clouds the waters, so wait for a second opinion on any claims they make.
stevebmark 4y ago
Vercel is fantastic, they made a blunder, I guess. I don't really care. They're bringing JS tooling light-years past where it was originally. Webpack has needed to go away for the longest time, and Vercel might finally have done it by hiring Tobias. And it's objectively faster than Vite, not that I care. Everyone is jumping on it, and accountability is good, but no reason to avoid Vercel.
- piskerpan 4y ago
  Note: what makes webpack “great” is its extensibility. Until Turbopack reaches that point (and officially they said they won’t) it won’t replace it. “Successors of webpack” is just more marketing as webpack isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Turbopack is just another packer among a sea of them.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    The author of Turbopack is the creator and maintainer of Webpack.
    - endorphine 4y ago
      This is in no way a counter-argument to the parent post. Parent talks purely about software while you're talking about the author of the software.
      - Kiro 4y ago
        It's not "just another packer" in this context and calling it a successor is not "just more marketing".
        rk06 4y ago
        by that logic, deno is successor to node
        endorphine 4y ago
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
> they're exaggerating the 10x figure From the submission: "There were number rounding issues in the original numbers for the 1k component case - Turbopack's 15ms was rounded down to 0.01s while Vite's 87ms was rounded up to 0.09s. This further got marketed as a 10x advantage when the original numbers were close to 6x." That is more than exaggeration, it's either incompetence or deceitful. They also did not even release a benchmark at first, and if you read Evan's writeup it could be argued the benchmark is not a fair comparison. They made a lot of noise about Next.js 13 when a lot of the new features are turbobroken. Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/yj4r3q/migration_from_cra_to_next_13_would_you_use_app/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/yj4r3q/migration_fr... They are claiming turbopack is a webpack successor purely based off of having hired the creator of webpack: https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1584996270242148352 https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1584996270242148352. They are pushing the idea that they are doing revolutionary stuff when in actual fact they are copying existing projects that have been around for years: - turbopack using the same architecture as Parcel: https://twitter.com/devongovett/status/1585035737971724288 https://twitter.com/devongovett/status/1585035737971724288 - "literally copy pasted Lage’s design and docs and branded it as Turborepo" https://twitter.com/jeffbcross/status/1583251710654283776 https://twitter.com/jeffbcross/status/1583251710654283776 I strongly dislike the way they have gone about marketing their new tech. Things like this also feel off: https://twitter.com/ascorbic/status/1585004156615479296 https://twitter.com/ascorbic/status/1585004156615479296

aniforprez 4y ago

I think I'm of the same mentality. IMO a lot of the comments here are histrionics that they misrepresented (and outright lied in some cases) the gap in efficiency of their tool. But it's still somewhat better than the existing tooling. All of this also has very little to do with Vercel as a product which is still pretty good and can run almost anything without needing to use their framework NextJS. I don't use Vercel myself and am perfectly content with Netlify which does what I need and more but I don't think any of this dissuades me from using Vercel Vercel simply has a lot of VC funding and is using marketing to sell their tooling and their platform. It's not unique to them, nor is it particularly egregious especially when Evan You himself clearly admits Turbopack is, in fact, slightly more performant than Vite. They lied about some benchmarks. Very dumb of them. I will move on and will not really avoid Vercel unless I have much more immediate concerns like their pricing or other ethics concerns that have more drastic effects

apineda 4y ago
I guess what irks people is when a big dog tries to gain "market share" with half truths, which may perhaps unjustly and negatively affect highly regarded open source efforts. I get that it sounds good though, better than "6% faster at the 30k module threshold".

brundolf 4y ago

You don't need to avoid them (at least their OSS projects). They mostly make good stuff. They just have an overzealous marketing department that clouds the waters, so wait for a second opinion on any claims they make.

stevebmark 4y ago

Vercel is fantastic, they made a blunder, I guess. I don't really care. They're bringing JS tooling light-years past where it was originally. Webpack has needed to go away for the longest time, and Vercel might finally have done it by hiring Tobias. And it's objectively faster than Vite, not that I care. Everyone is jumping on it, and accountability is good, but no reason to avoid Vercel.

piskerpan 4y ago
Note: what makes webpack “great” is its extensibility. Until Turbopack reaches that point (and officially they said they won’t) it won’t replace it. “Successors of webpack” is just more marketing as webpack isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Turbopack is just another packer among a sea of them.
- Kiro 4y ago
  The author of Turbopack is the creator and maintainer of Webpack.
  - endorphine 4y ago
    This is in no way a counter-argument to the parent post. Parent talks purely about software while you're talking about the author of the software.
    - Kiro 4y ago
      It's not "just another packer" in this context and calling it a successor is not "just more marketing".
      - rk06 4y ago
        by that logic, deno is successor to node
      - endorphine 4y ago

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

> they're exaggerating the 10x figure From the submission: "There were number rounding issues in the original numbers for the 1k component case - Turbopack's 15ms was rounded down to 0.01s while Vite's 87ms was rounded up to 0.09s. This further got marketed as a 10x advantage when the original numbers were close to 6x." That is more than exaggeration, it's either incompetence or deceitful. They also did not even release a benchmark at first, and if you read Evan's writeup it could be argued the benchmark is not a fair comparison. They made a lot of noise about Next.js 13 when a lot of the new features are turbobroken. Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/yj4r3q/migration_from_cra_to_next_13_would_you_use_app/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/yj4r3q/migration_fr... They are claiming turbopack is a webpack successor purely based off of having hired the creator of webpack: https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1584996270242148352 https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1584996270242148352. They are pushing the idea that they are doing revolutionary stuff when in actual fact they are copying existing projects that have been around for years: - turbopack using the same architecture as Parcel: https://twitter.com/devongovett/status/1585035737971724288 https://twitter.com/devongovett/status/1585035737971724288 - "literally copy pasted Lage’s design and docs and branded it as Turborepo" https://twitter.com/jeffbcross/status/1583251710654283776 https://twitter.com/jeffbcross/status/1583251710654283776 I strongly dislike the way they have gone about marketing their new tech. Things like this also feel off: https://twitter.com/ascorbic/status/1585004156615479296 https://twitter.com/ascorbic/status/1585004156615479296