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Well, you should compare the JS UI ecosystem to other UI ecosystems like Android and iOS, not ecosystems that run on one machine with no UI. Then you'd make a
by hombre_fatal 2y ago
Well, you should compare the JS UI ecosystem to other UI ecosystems like Android and iOS, not ecosystems that run on one machine with no UI.
Then you'd make a more sensible comparison like React versus something like SwiftUI which is constantly changing, constantly breaking, and still basically in beta mode for 10 years, yet it only runs on specific versions of Apple hardware and software. And usually it's so insufficient that you also build part of your app in UIKit/Cocoa in a completely different language.
React is far more stable to build with and far less experimental.
People who have never touched any UI tech until HTML/JS have no clue how good they have it, so they confuse universally hard things about UI tech with something that must be specific to JS, so they additionally assume it's so much better elsewhere.
You should try updating a nontrivial SwiftUI app you made for the iPhone 11 to work on the iPhone 16. Not only have your libraries changed (not just topical ones, but the Promise library you used is defunct and everything now uses Combine and 2021 Swift async features, so you have to migrate all of your async code), but the platform itself doesn't have APIs that you were using anymore. That's not even a class of problem you deal with on browser tech.
- porterehunley 2y agoThis is strange to hear because I switched over to SwiftUI/Native from web-based(react native) because I was so frustrated with the JS UI ecosystem. I would be stuck for a long time from conflicting package dependencies after updating/adding a new library. JS seems like the only ecosystem where adding a few simple libraries results in hundreds of added packages.
- wolvesechoes 2y ago"Well, you should compare the JS UI ecosystem to other UI ecosystems like Android and iOS, not ecosystems that run on one machine with no UI." "People who have never touched any UI tech until HTML/JS have no clue how good they have it" Tech like: - Delphi/Free Pascal, where usually code from 20 years ago compiles today with minor adjustments? - Qt, developed and maintained for over 30 years, currently at 6th major release? - Win32, and frameworks built on top of it like MFC, WinForms, WPF? Yeah, we are SO lucky we've got JS ecosystem. It is impossible to think how people lived without it.
- gmueckl 2y agoJust to reinforce how stable the desktop environment can be: - Qt has had a mostly stable interface since Qt 4.0 and that was twenty years ago. - Win32 has had barely any breaking changes since it was introduced with NT 3.1 in 1993 or so. Most of the UI/UX churn in that space comes from fashion changes in UI design.
- cyberax 2y agoOn the other hand, I can write a very complicated graphics-related app in React+tons_of_libs within _days_. It took me months to do that in Win32 API in 2005. The developer velocity enabled by React is insane.
- wolvesechoes 2y agoYes, saying that calling Win32 APIs is not the most ergonomic approach to writing UIs would be an understatement, but if any software can be called stable, this is it.
- icar 2y agoI would compare win32 API to vanilla JS. Whatever framework you might want to use on top of win32 is what's comparable to the criticized web tech in the article.
- lenkite 2y agoYour win32 app would have been much faster with much less memory hogging though. I would prefer to run that compared to your React app.
- cyberax 2y agoThe choice really is between React and nothing. React (and Electron) enabled a lot of apps to be written that would not have existed otherwise.
- pjmlp 2y ago