4 ms·

Great writeup, thanks to the author for sharing his deep experience in such a readable way. My career has also spanned different eras of UI tech, from win16/32,

Great writeup, thanks to the author for sharing his deep experience in such a readable way. My career has also spanned different eras of UI tech, from win16/32, through server-generated HTML, Objective C and Swift/UI on mobile, and now I'm a full-time react and react native neckbeard. And I ran to the react stack about 7-8 years ago from native iOS development. It made everything so much easier. On the way out the Cocoa door, I was pelted with comments about Performance, which was viewed as lacking in JS, a true second class citizen on a smartphone. And they were right. If your app needed it. Which it generally didn't - until it did. When the app I was writing started dealing with larger and larger amounts of data, a larger and larger number of views to visualize that data, large images being panned and zoomed ... I wanted the bare metal, I wanted the multithreading. I wanted the memory control. That said, if you aren't going to push things that far graphics wise, and most apps don't, js/css/html is, to me, a far more joyful way to go. Author didn't even touch on compile-time benefits, but they are spectacular when you go from Xcode, to React, then put the afterburners on with Fast Refresh, which is, truly, instant.

bombolo 4y ago
Well if you include the "download all the js dependencies" step… there it goes any time benefit you might have gained.
- marstall 4y ago
  that's not part of Fast Refresh. Fast Refresh only compiles the lines you've changed - something like that.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    You know that c++ also doesn't need to recompile everything if you just change 1 file right?
    - marstall 4y ago
      there's a magic with fast refresh which is that the code doesn't need to be rebundled and redeployed after a change. this would correspond to the linking and execution phase in c++. makes for an amazing experience when you are doing interactive development, orders of magnitude better in terms of responsiveness to the code you're writing.

bombolo 4y ago

Well if you include the "download all the js dependencies" step… there it goes any time benefit you might have gained.

marstall 4y ago
that's not part of Fast Refresh. Fast Refresh only compiles the lines you've changed - something like that.
- bombolo 4y ago
  You know that c++ also doesn't need to recompile everything if you just change 1 file right?
  - marstall 4y ago
    there's a magic with fast refresh which is that the code doesn't need to be rebundled and redeployed after a change. this would correspond to the linking and execution phase in c++. makes for an amazing experience when you are doing interactive development, orders of magnitude better in terms of responsiveness to the code you're writing.