12 ms·

The React Foundation

313 points by DanielHB 1y ago

disillusioned 1y ago
Is it me, or does $600,000 a year (presuming that $3M is over the 5 year period) seem a bit of a weak contribution from a company with a $1.8 trillion market cap that's regularly making $100M-$250M TC pay packages for AI scientists? Like, I get that nothing is _owed_ here, but this feels like more of the same tragedy of the commons open source problem we see: tools that millions of apps depend on, barely propped up, and in this case, the child of a megacorporation that could easily create a proper evergreen endowment rather than a milquetoast token contribution to save face. Or should we just be grateful?
- physicsguy 1y ago
  How do you value what they already put into it?
  - esperent 1y ago
    Let's round their yearly revenue at around $160 billion, then assume they've spent $3 million a year on React. That would put the cost at 0.002% of revenue, or to put it another way, if they dedicated just 1% of revenue to philanthropy, they could fund 500 React sized projects indefinitely.
    - flowerlad 1y ago
      Zuckerberg doesn’t have a good track record with philanthropy https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/25/tech/chan-zuckerberg-primary-school-closing https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/25/tech/chan-zuckerberg-primary-...
      - throw-10-8 1y ago
        Didn't Meta donate $1m to Trumps bribery fund?
    - motoxpro 1y ago
      Spending 1% of revenue on developer tooling would be insane. Spending 100% of a philanthropy budget on developer tooling would be even MORE insane.
- nicce 1y ago
  I guess Vercel does the most lifting in non-native React these days? Didn’t they hire the core developers?
  - fcanesin 1y ago
    this, Vercel is at ~10B valuation with a business built atop React - they should and will probably take more of Meta space as stewards for it.
    - BoorishBears 1y ago
      Please no. They don't have the best interests of React in mind. They threw the resources behind RSC to make React, a framework for frontend reactivity, force opt-in for frontend reactivity. Meta is needed more than ever at this point, before React fully becomes a framework for burning compute on Vercel's infra.
      - karimf 1y ago
        I agree with this. I’d prefer to have Meta be the steward for React instead of Vercel because Meta does not have a conflict of interest.
        mdhb 1y ago
        They might not have the conflict of interest but they also don’t have the business interest either. Meta is a spyware company who makes all of their money from collecting personal data to sell to advertisers. They have zero incentive to dedicate any kind of significant resources to supporting millions of websites using their internal UI library.
      - Rapzid 1y ago
        Because Vercel makes money when components are rendered server side not client side. I know almost nobody that even uses server side components. It's right out if your backend isn't node..
    - 1y ago
- philipwhiuk 1y ago
  > dedicated engineering support is probably worth more in practice. The $3m will basically just cover 'founding the foundation' I guess. I do wonder whether this is a sign Facebook may no longer develop new stuff in React.
  - disillusioned 1y ago
    I do think I read that as being _part_ of the $3M, not in _addition_ to, which absolutely increases the overall value of the contribution, likely materially.
- gampleman 1y ago
  They also have a team of full time react devs they are paying for. That seems to me more than sufficient. $600,000/year just to run a governance board and organize a conference seems extraordinarily generous to me. In fact I think it's more likely the $3M is more likely to form an endowment for the foundation that will fund it's expenses running forward.
  - flowerlad 1y ago
    > They also have a team of full time react devs they are paying for. For now. My guess is they will be included in the next round of layoffs. Money for $100 Million pay packages for AI researchers has to come from somewhere!
- mythz 1y ago
  I don't understand the entitlement here? Somehow because Meta has released a popular OSS library and dedicated over 10 years of engineering resources to it (that has generated immense value for the wider ecosystem), that they should've shelled out more than the $3M they're contributing in order to give its ownership away to a non-profit. Maybe it's just me but I think they've contributed more than enough. I'm grateful for what they've already contributed and anything else they choose to contribute in future.
  - wslh 1y ago
    I think once the React community engine is working you need less budget because of third-party contributions.
  - 1dom 1y ago
    You're right, $3million is a lot for an open source project, with no other context. But in the context of who that $3million is coming from, how much they have available, how much responsibility they have for the state of it, and how much value it provides to everyone who isn't them, I think it's fair some people might have expected a little more.
    - lesuorac 1y ago
      But why? If this went the other way where say FaceBook let people freely create accounts and talk to everybody and then later on either charged 10$/month, plastered the site with ads, or started to selling user data people would be upset about a bait and switch. If you release something for free as you shouldn't be expected compensation for it. People also shouldn't expect anything beyond the terms that you've released it underneath as well.
      - cap11235 1y ago
        Right! As long as the license is obeyed, who are you to complain? If the original developer has a problem with the results of something like the MIT License, well, they chose that, and licensing choices are very extensively documented in news. Pro-tip: LICENSE files are just text! you can edit them. The license is the license, and if someone fucks that up, well, they fucked up. Don't want Amazon to use your lib? Just say that. I have very little pity for those that complain about this sort of thing. "Gratitude" has little legal standing, and expecting a corporation to be ethical is absurd as apologizing to your tapeworm. If you really want a non-corporate license, there is always Baba Yaga, which no corporation's lawyers will want to touch. https://smallandnearlysilent.com/baba-yaga/LICENSE.txt https://smallandnearlysilent.com/baba-yaga/LICENSE.txt
- rs186 1y ago
  Most open source projects receive $0 a year from companies that use them.
- theknarf 1y ago
  The post said they would also still pay for their own internal team that would keep contributing code to React, so it feels more like their throwing in $600k in addition to what they already do. And they have brought inn other companies who hopefully also contribute money, seems like a lot more of an healthy situation than before.
- nothrowaways 1y ago
  Multiply this by the number of multi billion mc companies that are built on it
- nothrowaways 1y ago
  Multiply this by the number of multi billion mc companies that are built with it
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
a1371 1y ago
This sound like positive news for the Dev community. I can imagine it took a lot of patience and intention to get Meta onboard with this.
Squarex 1y ago
Does this make React more or less dependend on Vercel?
- throw-10-8 1y ago
  More, they are part of the foundation.
  - azangru 1y ago
    According to the React team page [0], five members of the team work at Vercel. This has been the case for several years. Vercel has been a major contributor in the development of React. How does the creation of the foundation make React more dependent on Vercel? [0] - https://react.dev/community/team https://react.dev/community/team
    - cryptonym 1y ago
      Isn't the foundation a formal way for meta to step-out and let others take/share ownership?
matsemann 1y ago
Oh man, having Vercel on the board is a bummer. Not only because they want to take React a way I disagree with, but it's clear that the CEO is on the wrong side of history in other matters as well (lots of recent drama).
- azangru 1y ago
  I am baffled by this take that I've been seeing all over the internet recently. A CEO is a person. He is human. Can't a human be on the wrong side of history on various matters, and what does it matter if he is? Can't he still do a decent job (whatever it is that CEOs do)? Why do we expect random entrepreneurs, celebrities, engineers, and so on to also be moral authorities or role models?
  - shafyy 1y ago
    This is always the same age-old discussion: Can you separate the art from the arists? And unsurprisingly, different people have different views on it. Even if you disagree, you should be able to understand why people don't want to use a product if their usage of that product makes the owner and CEO more powerful (and they think them being more powerful is a bad thing for humanity). Edit to add a simple example: Musk's wealth is mostly tied up in Tesla -> You think Musk uses his wealth to wield political power, political power that makes the world a worse place -> You still think Teslas are good cars -> Even though you think that, you don't want to spend your money on buying a Tesla, because this will make Musk more wealthly -> Start at the beginning
    - larnon 1y ago
      It is irrelevant whether we can separate the art from the artist, especially in this matter, when both the art and the artist are bad.
  - matsemann 1y ago
    If you're baffled and you're seeing it all over the internet, could it be that you're the one with the wrong take? Food for thought.
throw-10-8 1y ago
Vercel being involved is a huge red flag. NextJS is a pile of garbage, and their platform is absurdly expensive and leans heavily on vendor lock in.
- iamsaitam 1y ago
  Why is NextJS a pile of garbage?
  - tacker2000 1y ago
    It’s VC funded, overengineered crap, specifically designed to push people into using their overpriced hosting. I hope this isnt the way that React as a whole will go in the end. But fortunately there are enough alternatives about.
  - throw-10-8 1y ago
    - fragile under load and very difficult to debug SSR issues - inconsistent behavior between hosted and self hosted versions of the same code - horrible build times, like laughably bad multi-minute builds for trivial code bases - crappy directory based routing system with lots of weird gotchas - schizo identity JAMstack -> serverless -> ssr -> now its microvms + ai - multiple hilariously long running GH issues where the dev team is thrashing around trying to debug their own black box framework - "framework" that barely provides any of the primitives necessary to build web apps - major breaking changes around core features like routing that require painful migrations - general sloppiness, churn, and insecurity that comes from being part of the nodejs ecosystem Thats not even getting into all of the shady patterns vercel uses to lock you into their overpriced hosting. I've been a part of multiple teams that decided to build apps using NextJS, and while the FE is not my responsibility I typically got pulled in to help troubleshoot random issues. It was a complete waste of time in almost every case, and in one case resulted in the entire FE team being let go because they were unable to ship anything on time.
    - molszanski 1y ago
      Try Astro my friend. React SSR with none of that next bs
askonomm 1y ago
That's one way to sell a open source project I guess. Not only did Vercel really fight to not have any mention on the React docs about using React _without_ Vercel, but downright to using wording to imply that if you do then you're using it wrong. All clearly states the direction that Vercel is taking React. Soon enough it'll be Vercel-only software.
- tom1337 1y ago
  Yea Vercel being included in this also is a bummer to me - but honestly if history told us anything if they are making some stupid decisions, like completely vendor locking it, it wouldn't take long until a community maintained fork will be created. Same story as Valkey, OpenTofu, MariaDB, NextCloud and so on.
  - askonomm 1y ago
    Oh yeah, and there already is (preact, for example). I'm not worried about losing front-end SPA libraries. If anything, I'm just annoyed at the endless greed of VC funded firms.
- theknarf 1y ago
  Hopefully the foundation will help balance that.
- Rapzid 1y ago
  Wasn't there push back to including Vite in the docs? Even when it was clear Vite was the new defacto way to setup a React project?
  - askonomm 1y ago
    There was indeed. Took a whole bunch of us on GitHub to make them finally add it.
- darepublic 1y ago
  reminds me of "use effect considered harmful, instead use these library hooks that call use effect behind the scenes".
azangru 1y ago
To anyone excited by this news, could they explain, like I'm five, what is it that makes it exciting? Why would developers (or non-developers?) care?
- simpaticoder 1y ago
  Marky (FB) and Vicky (Vercel) are rich kids and are spending their tooth fairy money to buy every kid at your kindergarten a cool toy. Some kids don't like the toy, but that's okay there are other toys. Some other kids (and esp their parents) think this is terrible, that Marky is being cheap and Vicky only wants control of the playground. They don't like Marky and Vicky and try to hurt them every chance they get.
  - azangru 1y ago
    But every kid at my kindergarten already had the toy. Any time they said npm install react, the new shiny toy was brought to them. I thought that's exactly what mattered to the kids, the toy. What do they care what shop the toy comes from or what Marky and Vicky are up to?
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Because Markey called everyone dumbfucks back in 2004 and some people are still butthurt about it, so Mommy and daddy really don't like going to that particular store to buy things.
    - cryptonym 1y ago
      Soon current version of the toy will be deemed unsafe and start catching fire. You'll have to get a new version of the toy, still available easily but it'll only run on crazy expensive batteries you can get from Vicky. Or you could try to build your own batteries but specifications for those are hazardous, undocumented and changes over time. Also, for the new version of the toy you'll have to learn to play a new game as the old way to play with it'll become half-working. At least that's what parents are afraid of.
d--b 1y ago
Is it just me or does this feel like peak React?
- throw-10-8 1y ago
  Peak react was React 16 imo.
  - quink 1y ago
    Hooks were first introduced in 16.8. Make it 18 maybe?
    - halflife 1y ago
      I think that that was the point
      - flowerlad 1y ago
        Exactly!
    - recursive 1y ago
      You're this close to getting it.
jwr 1y ago
Happy to see a clear path for React going forward. React is under-appreciated in some circles of the fast-moving JavaScript world, where people are somehow expected to rewrite all their code from scratch every couple of years or so, after somebody starts shouting "framework X is dead", and everybody starts focusing on the new hotness. I'm not sure how that is economically viable, I know I couldn't afford that kind of approach. I have a Clojure/ClojureScript app using React that I've been maintaining for the last 10 years. I don't use all the features of React, in fact I could probably use a much smaller library — the biggest advantage is that it provides a "re-render the UI based on app state change" model that fits Clojure very well. But I'm very happy that React is there and that it's been maintained with relatively little code rewriting necessary over the years.
- madeofpalk 1y ago
  > React is under-appreciated in some circles of the fast-moving JavaScript world, where people are somehow expected to rewrite all their code from scratch every couple of years or so, after somebody starts shouting "framework X is dead", and everybody starts focusing on the new hotness. Has this ever really been the case in the past 10 years?
  - tobr 1y ago
    No, and not before that either. It’s a bizarre thing to say, honestly. React is used near universally, despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way. That is the opposite of being under appreciated. Hype about a new technology, deserved or not, doesn’t mean that everyone is throwing their old code away, especially not their jobby job code.
    - prhn 1y ago
      Let's not conflate the two things that were said. It is absolutely true that companies were rushing to rewrite their code every few years when the new shiny JS library or framework came out. I was there for it. There was a quick transition from [nothing / mootools?] to jQuery to Backbone to React, with a short Angular detour about 13 years ago. If you had experience with the "new" framework you could pretty much get a front-end gig anywhere with little friction. I rewrote many codebases across multiple companies to Backbone during that time per the request of engineering management. Now, is React underappreciated? In the past 10 years or so I've started to see a pattern of lack of appreciation for what it brings to the table and the problems it solved. It is used near universally because it was such a drastic improvement over previous options that it was instantly adopted. But as we know, adoption does not mean appreciation. > React is used near universally, despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way. Good example of under-appreciation.
pimterry 1y ago
It feels like React generally has an ongoing trajectory towards increasing complexity and features. For something that's effectively become the standard for frontend that's unfortunate. It would be great to have a simple reliable base, with extensions & addition complexity layered on top or included optionally. This announcement doesn't fill me with hope for that direction unfortunately, it mostly seems like Vercel getting more control, and they're driving a lot of that movement. Being able to ignore parallel rendering, RSC, hooks, etc, and just write simple code for simple sites again would be fantastic. Unfortunately all the major competition I've seen seems so significantly different that migrating any kind of non-trivial application would basically be a full rewrite. Is Preact or similar offering much promise here?
- flowerlad 1y ago
  Absolutely agree. Leave well enough alone. If they keep adding features it is only going to get worse.
- christophilus 1y ago
  Preact is great. It’s not 100% the same as React, but it’s close enough and good enough and has been excellent for my use cases (SPAs).
- iamtheworstdev 1y ago
  > It feels like React generally has an ongoing trajectory towards increasing complexity and features. For something that's effectively become the standard for frontend that's unfortunate. Is that not every software development effort, ever? Isn't that why "todo" apps, search engines, etc, constantly get "recreated". Live long enough to become the enemy and get replaced by a bare bones app that'll bloat itself into oblivion and repeat the cycle?
  - throw-10-8 1y ago
    No, there is an entire school of thinking that advocates the exact opposite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
h1fra 1y ago
That's good news for the project but having that many big corps in charge will for sure continue to bloat the software
DoctorOW 1y ago
Small tangent: I noticed the HN in the share menu is the only one in color. They're unable to change it unless they host a copy of the icon themselves (they're hotlinking https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.svg https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.svg). Surprised they don't have their own CDN/icon font at Facebook scale.
- jaapz 1y ago
  Weirdest part is they are hosting all the other icons themselves, just not the HN one
- cnity 1y ago
  You don't even need to "host" it per se, just include the icon source in the webpage. It's 315B.
  - tschwimmer 1y ago
    You think bandwidth is free? -Sent from my 1T parameter LLM
kaoD 1y ago
After seeing all the comments here I'm a bit relieved. I don't care about the CEO's political stance, but Vercel's involvement with React has rubbed me the wrong way since the start of development of RSC. The development was basically behind half-closed doors, pretty much tied to Next.js (i.e. Vercel) and with zero specs except a high level description of what they were and their public API. I don't care that they were WIP: the community should've been involved, not Vercel as a benevolent dictator guiding their design from start to almost finish. Such a huge paradigm shift shouldn't have been dictated by any particular entity... and IMO much less Next's team which I think are prone to overengineering and bad decisions. IIRC there were points in time (maybe even currently?) where you had to use packages that were published to NPM but not even on any public repo. I love the idea of RSC but that's where my love ends. I thought I was alone on this.
- k__ 1y ago
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  - thrance 1y ago
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    - staticelf 1y ago
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      - thrance 1y ago
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        christophilus 1y ago
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        lukan 1y ago
phplovesong 1y ago
Its kind of amazing how big a single library (that does very little really) has become. React is obviously the "new jquery", and something else will come one day. So many specially boot-camp devs are "react only" devs. Scary stuff.
- romanovcode 1y ago
  > Scary stuff. Why? When jQuery went away nothing happened. People just learned the new frameworks.
  - huflungdung 1y ago
    [dead]
  - hu3 1y ago
    I don't think jQuery went away. And it might never unless browsers implement better DOM apis. The current DOM API implementation reminds me of that quote: "look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power"
- philipallstar 1y ago
  It's not scary. It's a pretty small API surface. Lots of time is spent on component styling and all that stuff, which isn't React-specific. Web components tech such as Lit might be part of the future, replacing JSX, and then React purely becomes a middleware tool for DOM diffing and shuffling events up and data down.
  - afavour 1y ago
    IMO OP is correct that the bootcamp devs are scary, not React itself. I’ve interviewed a number of engineers who have very little grasp of what the DOM is and how it works because React abstracts the whole thing away. Server components are another are where some niceties mean a bunch of developers aren’t really understanding what’s going on with underlying HTTP requests. While React’s API surface is small the average app will come with a chunk of extra stuff: Redux, next.js, yadda yadda. People take entire courses that never leave that bubble.
Vipsy 1y ago
The new foundation could be a turning point for React, but whether it truly decentralizes decision-making depends on how governance works in practice, not just on the list of corporate sponsors. Open source foundations have helped some projects thrive by formalizing community input, but they can also be slow to adapt if board dynamics favor stability over innovation. The real question is whether small developer voices and radical ideas will shape React's future, or if practical influence stays with the largest sponsors. Compared to one company's oversight, a well-run foundation can make React less vulnerable to a single vendor's agenda—but only if its structures actively foster broad participation and accountability. We'll see if React's evolution speeds up or settles into consensus-driven conservatism.
- SonOfLilit 1y ago
  Are you implicitly complaining that React is not moving fast enough? What the JS ecosystem needs is for some big players to CHILL a bit and take backwards compat more seriously.
  - agos 1y ago
    when something is moving orthogonally to where you would like it to move, it might as well be not moving for you
    - brazukadev 1y ago
      With RSC it moved to the wrong direction
  - robertoandred 1y ago
    React has had very few breaking changes.
notyouraibot 1y ago
I'm disappointed that Vercel is a part of this foundation. NextJS is on its way to its funeral, they have absolutely ruined it with things nobody asked for or cares about. I have been working on a large scale NextJS app which when I run locally consumes just over 8GB OF RAM on M4 Mac Mini. Brilliant. Slowly migrating the application to a Vite Based React SPA with a dedicated Hono backend and life is already looking already better.
gettingoverit 1y ago
I should remind that in a similarly cheerful mood FB dumped support of Jest and a bunch of other libraries. They have a long history of killing successful projects. Worse, Vercel is involved, and I literally don't remember anything good about that company. I'd recommend to be very cautious with such news, and use older versions of React for the next couple of years.
- wallawe 1y ago
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  - gettingoverit 1y ago
    Until they dump your startup for no reason, and you'll have to migrate off their undocumented proprietary infrastructure. Please read stories on HN. You're risking your business if you work with them.
  - mexicocitinluez 1y ago
    lol this has got to be satire
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - throw-10-8 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - wallawe 1y ago
      I've been using Vercel for > 5 years. Suppose it's possible but that's true for any platform.
      - AstroBen 1y ago
        ...no it isn't If you host your non-nextjs SPA on Cloudflare and they do something you hate.. you move Vercel has every incentive to lock everyone in as hard as possible and raise prices all they can. Not something I'd want to tie my business to
stevev 1y ago
It’s natural for Vercel to have a strong influence on the project. That’s what happens when a framework grows large and fragmented without a defined board, group, or leadership focused on both short- and long-term goals. At least now, with the foundation in place, there are additional voices to help guide the project rather than letting it move entirely in line with Vercel’s direction.
weinzierl 1y ago
Is there more information somewhere than in this short article, for example a timeline or the planned legal form?
antonyh 1y ago
Governance by mega-corporations working in a cartel. Having read this recent article [https://lithub.com/how-american-tech-cartels-use-apps-to-break-the-law/ https://lithub.com/how-american-tech-cartels-use-apps-to-bre...], I fail to see how this is a good thing. Gatekeepers with self-interests at the heart of the decision making process.
- azemetre 1y ago
  It's extremely worrying on how they had to use a private "foundation" rather than using existing, more democratic, organizations like OpenJS foundation. Don't expect user input, don't expect changes that go against their wants over the community's needs, and don't expect things to get better.
dzogchen 1y ago
Does this mean there is a chance we will get an ESM browser-compatible build of React after 10 years?
rglover 1y ago
If you just want tools that work/make it easy to build apps and websites with JS (and you want direct access to the guy building them), you may find what I built after leaving React/Next interesting [1]. I built this because the creeping complexity and confusion of React's APIs combined with the stress of building a SaaS w/ Next.js became a giant ball of stress and time waste. Feel free to jump in the Discord [2] with any questions. [1] https://cheatcode.co/joystick https://cheatcode.co/joystick [2] http://discord.cheatcode.co http://discord.cheatcode.co
- nonethewiser 1y ago
  I find it immediately off-putting that a I'd choose a framework based on whether or not I'm building a SaaS. Maybe it streamlines certain things but the lock-in to the frameworks set of features and way of doing things feels like a bad decision.
  - rglover 1y ago
    A SaaS is just the focus but it can build plain websites just fine. IMO, it streamlines everything. But people have to get out of their own way and try it—not form surface-level opinions from a quick scroll. I'm actually shocked how few people will even try it. They sit and bitch about React/Next, but when someone offers a solution, they poo poo it (usually for superficial reasons) and then go back to suffering. Joystick is for developers who are tired of that cycle and just want to build something that just works (and they actually understand why it works). Honestly, I'm surprised more people don't trust my way of doing things and continue to walk on to the kill floor that is corporate and VC-backed tech.
    - nonethewiser 1y ago
      That's why I framed it as my immediate reaction. Of course 99.9% of people who read your comment aren't going to just go try it. It's totally fair to react to the elevator pitch.
      - 1y ago
qgin 1y ago
I am always surprised to see the anti-Vercel stuff here. NextJS has repeatedly solved every thing I wanted React to do beyond its out-of-the-box fearures. You can pry NextJS from my cold, dead hands.
- thrance 1y ago
  No matter the merits of NextJS, they are very valid political reasons why one might want to distance themselves from Vercel.
- jakubmazanec 1y ago
  That's normal. Happy customers don't have the same need to post comments as the angry ones.
ontouchstart 1y ago
React 16 was released in 2017, the same year transformer-based models was announced. We can feel nostalgia but the world is moving. It is hard to predict how everything will be in 5 years.
modo_mario 1y ago
If from this indeed follows more push for ssr and vercel related stuff as many seem to be projecting is there any credible fork that has some following already that aims to basically be React but without those elements as a focuspoint?
- worble 1y ago
  There's always preact, which is pretty much a drop in react replacement.
r_lee 1y ago
Is that logo/banner AI generated?
darepublic 1y ago
I still like React but I agree that it has lost its way somewhat. Hooks are very counter-intuitive and I don't think you can really call them a successful abstraction. You just get used to them over time. I don't use this react suspense stuff, nor have I kept up with the latest server side rendering with React tech. It doesn't appeal to me, I only use next + react with the pre-rendered export path and I think that niche still works fantastic. But at some point in the future they may take this away from me. This tends to happen with frameworks. A new one arises (next / react) and then over the course of many major version updates tends to just scope creep and try to do too much, or is monetized (next) and needs to find ways to justify people spending money on what was previously just free open source code.
- wry_discontent 1y ago
  React was such a simple and elegant solution when it started, and it's accreted so many quirks and weird behaviors that are clearly specific to the use cases of the companies leading development. At this point, I'm not interested in what they're doing anymore. I'm not starting new projects with React, and I'd move away from it for anything small.
- tekkk 1y ago
  I'd say React has become broken. The fact you have to by default wrap everything in a hook and cycle the boilerplate from one component to another is insane. useMemo, useCallback-use this and that. What are we even doing here in the first place? Playing whack-a-hook? And then you still can end up with stale closures. The fact they are over-engineering the server-side rendering is a cherry on top. React used to prize itself as the minimalistic solution but now they invent abstractions just to feel smart it seems.
postepowanieadm 1y ago
Happy to see more European(in this case Polish) companies getting involved.
gorbypark 1y ago
I am surprised to see three react native focused companies on the list. Expo, Software Mansion and Callstack are by far the big dogs in the RN ecosystem.
jakubmazanec 1y ago
It seems that as usual, there are just two groups: people who for some reason didn't like React and its way of things, but now found something else they do like (which is good!), but now still have the need to shit on React; the second group likes React and never had serious problems using it. I don't understand what is so complicated about hooks. It's a good abstraction with specific trade-off s. I think people forget that when React came out, it was awesome. Declarative, fast, and composable. I immediately wrote my own VDOM-based library ([1]), faster than React (probably with a lot more bugs, but my apps didn't have the same requirements as Facebook) - that's how inspiring React was. So many UI libraries :D Also it's funny that some people think that it's just a big cartel that will force developers to use React forever, and others think it's inevitable that something better will come up. [1] https://github.com/datanautika/ash https://github.com/datanautika/ash
- brazukadev 1y ago
  > there are just two groups: people who for some reason didn't like React and its way of things, but now found something else they do like (which is good!), but now still have the need to shit on React; the second group likes React and never had serious problems using it. There is a growing but already big third group of ex-React developers, even ex-React evangelists. You can see them in this thread and I think it is the majority of people talking about React's problems.
  - jakubmazanec 1y ago
    > it is the majority of people talking about React's problems. Hmm, I'm not sure. I would say the majority thinks React is fine, and that majority isn't writing angry comments on HN.

313 points by DanielHB 1y ago

Is it me, or does $600,000 a year (presuming that $3M is over the 5 year period) seem a bit of a weak contribution from a company with a $1.8 trillion market cap that's regularly making $100M-$250M TC pay packages for AI scientists? Like, I get that nothing is _owed_ here, but this feels like more of the same tragedy of the commons open source problem we see: tools that millions of apps depend on, barely propped up, and in this case, the child of a megacorporation that could easily create a proper evergreen endowment rather than a milquetoast token contribution to save face. Or should we just be grateful?

physicsguy 1y ago
How do you value what they already put into it?
- esperent 1y ago
  Let's round their yearly revenue at around $160 billion, then assume they've spent $3 million a year on React. That would put the cost at 0.002% of revenue, or to put it another way, if they dedicated just 1% of revenue to philanthropy, they could fund 500 React sized projects indefinitely.
  - flowerlad 1y ago
    Zuckerberg doesn’t have a good track record with philanthropy https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/25/tech/chan-zuckerberg-primary-school-closing https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/25/tech/chan-zuckerberg-primary-...
    - throw-10-8 1y ago
      Didn't Meta donate $1m to Trumps bribery fund?
  - motoxpro 1y ago
    Spending 1% of revenue on developer tooling would be insane. Spending 100% of a philanthropy budget on developer tooling would be even MORE insane.
nicce 1y ago
I guess Vercel does the most lifting in non-native React these days? Didn’t they hire the core developers?
- fcanesin 1y ago
  this, Vercel is at ~10B valuation with a business built atop React - they should and will probably take more of Meta space as stewards for it.
  - BoorishBears 1y ago
    Please no. They don't have the best interests of React in mind. They threw the resources behind RSC to make React, a framework for frontend reactivity, force opt-in for frontend reactivity. Meta is needed more than ever at this point, before React fully becomes a framework for burning compute on Vercel's infra.
    - karimf 1y ago
      I agree with this. I’d prefer to have Meta be the steward for React instead of Vercel because Meta does not have a conflict of interest.
      - mdhb 1y ago
        They might not have the conflict of interest but they also don’t have the business interest either. Meta is a spyware company who makes all of their money from collecting personal data to sell to advertisers. They have zero incentive to dedicate any kind of significant resources to supporting millions of websites using their internal UI library.
    - Rapzid 1y ago
      Because Vercel makes money when components are rendered server side not client side. I know almost nobody that even uses server side components. It's right out if your backend isn't node..
  - 1y ago
philipwhiuk 1y ago
> dedicated engineering support is probably worth more in practice. The $3m will basically just cover 'founding the foundation' I guess. I do wonder whether this is a sign Facebook may no longer develop new stuff in React.
- disillusioned 1y ago
  I do think I read that as being _part_ of the $3M, not in _addition_ to, which absolutely increases the overall value of the contribution, likely materially.
gampleman 1y ago
They also have a team of full time react devs they are paying for. That seems to me more than sufficient. $600,000/year just to run a governance board and organize a conference seems extraordinarily generous to me. In fact I think it's more likely the $3M is more likely to form an endowment for the foundation that will fund it's expenses running forward.
- flowerlad 1y ago
  > They also have a team of full time react devs they are paying for. For now. My guess is they will be included in the next round of layoffs. Money for $100 Million pay packages for AI researchers has to come from somewhere!
mythz 1y ago
I don't understand the entitlement here? Somehow because Meta has released a popular OSS library and dedicated over 10 years of engineering resources to it (that has generated immense value for the wider ecosystem), that they should've shelled out more than the $3M they're contributing in order to give its ownership away to a non-profit. Maybe it's just me but I think they've contributed more than enough. I'm grateful for what they've already contributed and anything else they choose to contribute in future.
- wslh 1y ago
  I think once the React community engine is working you need less budget because of third-party contributions.
- 1dom 1y ago
  You're right, $3million is a lot for an open source project, with no other context. But in the context of who that $3million is coming from, how much they have available, how much responsibility they have for the state of it, and how much value it provides to everyone who isn't them, I think it's fair some people might have expected a little more.
  - lesuorac 1y ago
    But why? If this went the other way where say FaceBook let people freely create accounts and talk to everybody and then later on either charged 10$/month, plastered the site with ads, or started to selling user data people would be upset about a bait and switch. If you release something for free as you shouldn't be expected compensation for it. People also shouldn't expect anything beyond the terms that you've released it underneath as well.
    - cap11235 1y ago
      Right! As long as the license is obeyed, who are you to complain? If the original developer has a problem with the results of something like the MIT License, well, they chose that, and licensing choices are very extensively documented in news. Pro-tip: LICENSE files are just text! you can edit them. The license is the license, and if someone fucks that up, well, they fucked up. Don't want Amazon to use your lib? Just say that. I have very little pity for those that complain about this sort of thing. "Gratitude" has little legal standing, and expecting a corporation to be ethical is absurd as apologizing to your tapeworm. If you really want a non-corporate license, there is always Baba Yaga, which no corporation's lawyers will want to touch. https://smallandnearlysilent.com/baba-yaga/LICENSE.txt https://smallandnearlysilent.com/baba-yaga/LICENSE.txt
rs186 1y ago
Most open source projects receive $0 a year from companies that use them.
theknarf 1y ago
The post said they would also still pay for their own internal team that would keep contributing code to React, so it feels more like their throwing in $600k in addition to what they already do. And they have brought inn other companies who hopefully also contribute money, seems like a lot more of an healthy situation than before.
nothrowaways 1y ago
Multiply this by the number of multi billion mc companies that are built on it
nothrowaways 1y ago
Multiply this by the number of multi billion mc companies that are built with it

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

a1371 1y ago

This sound like positive news for the Dev community. I can imagine it took a lot of patience and intention to get Meta onboard with this.

Squarex 1y ago

Does this make React more or less dependend on Vercel?

throw-10-8 1y ago
More, they are part of the foundation.
- azangru 1y ago
  According to the React team page [0], five members of the team work at Vercel. This has been the case for several years. Vercel has been a major contributor in the development of React. How does the creation of the foundation make React more dependent on Vercel? [0] - https://react.dev/community/team https://react.dev/community/team
  - cryptonym 1y ago
    Isn't the foundation a formal way for meta to step-out and let others take/share ownership?

matsemann 1y ago

Oh man, having Vercel on the board is a bummer. Not only because they want to take React a way I disagree with, but it's clear that the CEO is on the wrong side of history in other matters as well (lots of recent drama).

azangru 1y ago
I am baffled by this take that I've been seeing all over the internet recently. A CEO is a person. He is human. Can't a human be on the wrong side of history on various matters, and what does it matter if he is? Can't he still do a decent job (whatever it is that CEOs do)? Why do we expect random entrepreneurs, celebrities, engineers, and so on to also be moral authorities or role models?
- shafyy 1y ago
  This is always the same age-old discussion: Can you separate the art from the arists? And unsurprisingly, different people have different views on it. Even if you disagree, you should be able to understand why people don't want to use a product if their usage of that product makes the owner and CEO more powerful (and they think them being more powerful is a bad thing for humanity). Edit to add a simple example: Musk's wealth is mostly tied up in Tesla -> You think Musk uses his wealth to wield political power, political power that makes the world a worse place -> You still think Teslas are good cars -> Even though you think that, you don't want to spend your money on buying a Tesla, because this will make Musk more wealthly -> Start at the beginning
  - larnon 1y ago
    It is irrelevant whether we can separate the art from the artist, especially in this matter, when both the art and the artist are bad.
- matsemann 1y ago
  If you're baffled and you're seeing it all over the internet, could it be that you're the one with the wrong take? Food for thought.

throw-10-8 1y ago

Vercel being involved is a huge red flag. NextJS is a pile of garbage, and their platform is absurdly expensive and leans heavily on vendor lock in.

iamsaitam 1y ago
Why is NextJS a pile of garbage?
- tacker2000 1y ago
  It’s VC funded, overengineered crap, specifically designed to push people into using their overpriced hosting. I hope this isnt the way that React as a whole will go in the end. But fortunately there are enough alternatives about.
- throw-10-8 1y ago
  - fragile under load and very difficult to debug SSR issues - inconsistent behavior between hosted and self hosted versions of the same code - horrible build times, like laughably bad multi-minute builds for trivial code bases - crappy directory based routing system with lots of weird gotchas - schizo identity JAMstack -> serverless -> ssr -> now its microvms + ai - multiple hilariously long running GH issues where the dev team is thrashing around trying to debug their own black box framework - "framework" that barely provides any of the primitives necessary to build web apps - major breaking changes around core features like routing that require painful migrations - general sloppiness, churn, and insecurity that comes from being part of the nodejs ecosystem Thats not even getting into all of the shady patterns vercel uses to lock you into their overpriced hosting. I've been a part of multiple teams that decided to build apps using NextJS, and while the FE is not my responsibility I typically got pulled in to help troubleshoot random issues. It was a complete waste of time in almost every case, and in one case resulted in the entire FE team being let go because they were unable to ship anything on time.
  - molszanski 1y ago
    Try Astro my friend. React SSR with none of that next bs

askonomm 1y ago

That's one way to sell a open source project I guess. Not only did Vercel really fight to not have any mention on the React docs about using React _without_ Vercel, but downright to using wording to imply that if you do then you're using it wrong. All clearly states the direction that Vercel is taking React. Soon enough it'll be Vercel-only software.

tom1337 1y ago
Yea Vercel being included in this also is a bummer to me - but honestly if history told us anything if they are making some stupid decisions, like completely vendor locking it, it wouldn't take long until a community maintained fork will be created. Same story as Valkey, OpenTofu, MariaDB, NextCloud and so on.
- askonomm 1y ago
  Oh yeah, and there already is (preact, for example). I'm not worried about losing front-end SPA libraries. If anything, I'm just annoyed at the endless greed of VC funded firms.
theknarf 1y ago
Hopefully the foundation will help balance that.
Rapzid 1y ago
Wasn't there push back to including Vite in the docs? Even when it was clear Vite was the new defacto way to setup a React project?
- askonomm 1y ago
  There was indeed. Took a whole bunch of us on GitHub to make them finally add it.
darepublic 1y ago
reminds me of "use effect considered harmful, instead use these library hooks that call use effect behind the scenes".

azangru 1y ago

To anyone excited by this news, could they explain, like I'm five, what is it that makes it exciting? Why would developers (or non-developers?) care?

simpaticoder 1y ago
Marky (FB) and Vicky (Vercel) are rich kids and are spending their tooth fairy money to buy every kid at your kindergarten a cool toy. Some kids don't like the toy, but that's okay there are other toys. Some other kids (and esp their parents) think this is terrible, that Marky is being cheap and Vicky only wants control of the playground. They don't like Marky and Vicky and try to hurt them every chance they get.
- azangru 1y ago
  But every kid at my kindergarten already had the toy. Any time they said npm install react, the new shiny toy was brought to them. I thought that's exactly what mattered to the kids, the toy. What do they care what shop the toy comes from or what Marky and Vicky are up to?
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Because Markey called everyone dumbfucks back in 2004 and some people are still butthurt about it, so Mommy and daddy really don't like going to that particular store to buy things.
  - cryptonym 1y ago
    Soon current version of the toy will be deemed unsafe and start catching fire. You'll have to get a new version of the toy, still available easily but it'll only run on crazy expensive batteries you can get from Vicky. Or you could try to build your own batteries but specifications for those are hazardous, undocumented and changes over time. Also, for the new version of the toy you'll have to learn to play a new game as the old way to play with it'll become half-working. At least that's what parents are afraid of.

d--b 1y ago

Is it just me or does this feel like peak React?

throw-10-8 1y ago
Peak react was React 16 imo.
- quink 1y ago
  Hooks were first introduced in 16.8. Make it 18 maybe?
  - halflife 1y ago
    I think that that was the point
    - flowerlad 1y ago
      Exactly!
  - recursive 1y ago
    You're this close to getting it.

jwr 1y ago

Happy to see a clear path for React going forward. React is under-appreciated in some circles of the fast-moving JavaScript world, where people are somehow expected to rewrite all their code from scratch every couple of years or so, after somebody starts shouting "framework X is dead", and everybody starts focusing on the new hotness. I'm not sure how that is economically viable, I know I couldn't afford that kind of approach. I have a Clojure/ClojureScript app using React that I've been maintaining for the last 10 years. I don't use all the features of React, in fact I could probably use a much smaller library — the biggest advantage is that it provides a "re-render the UI based on app state change" model that fits Clojure very well. But I'm very happy that React is there and that it's been maintained with relatively little code rewriting necessary over the years.

madeofpalk 1y ago
> React is under-appreciated in some circles of the fast-moving JavaScript world, where people are somehow expected to rewrite all their code from scratch every couple of years or so, after somebody starts shouting "framework X is dead", and everybody starts focusing on the new hotness. Has this ever really been the case in the past 10 years?
- tobr 1y ago
  No, and not before that either. It’s a bizarre thing to say, honestly. React is used near universally, despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way. That is the opposite of being under appreciated. Hype about a new technology, deserved or not, doesn’t mean that everyone is throwing their old code away, especially not their jobby job code.
  - prhn 1y ago
    Let's not conflate the two things that were said. It is absolutely true that companies were rushing to rewrite their code every few years when the new shiny JS library or framework came out. I was there for it. There was a quick transition from [nothing / mootools?] to jQuery to Backbone to React, with a short Angular detour about 13 years ago. If you had experience with the "new" framework you could pretty much get a front-end gig anywhere with little friction. I rewrote many codebases across multiple companies to Backbone during that time per the request of engineering management. Now, is React underappreciated? In the past 10 years or so I've started to see a pattern of lack of appreciation for what it brings to the table and the problems it solved. It is used near universally because it was such a drastic improvement over previous options that it was instantly adopted. But as we know, adoption does not mean appreciation. > React is used near universally, despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way. Good example of under-appreciation.

pimterry 1y ago

It feels like React generally has an ongoing trajectory towards increasing complexity and features. For something that's effectively become the standard for frontend that's unfortunate. It would be great to have a simple reliable base, with extensions & addition complexity layered on top or included optionally. This announcement doesn't fill me with hope for that direction unfortunately, it mostly seems like Vercel getting more control, and they're driving a lot of that movement. Being able to ignore parallel rendering, RSC, hooks, etc, and just write simple code for simple sites again would be fantastic. Unfortunately all the major competition I've seen seems so significantly different that migrating any kind of non-trivial application would basically be a full rewrite. Is Preact or similar offering much promise here?

flowerlad 1y ago
Absolutely agree. Leave well enough alone. If they keep adding features it is only going to get worse.
christophilus 1y ago
Preact is great. It’s not 100% the same as React, but it’s close enough and good enough and has been excellent for my use cases (SPAs).
iamtheworstdev 1y ago
> It feels like React generally has an ongoing trajectory towards increasing complexity and features. For something that's effectively become the standard for frontend that's unfortunate. Is that not every software development effort, ever? Isn't that why "todo" apps, search engines, etc, constantly get "recreated". Live long enough to become the enemy and get replaced by a bare bones app that'll bloat itself into oblivion and repeat the cycle?
- throw-10-8 1y ago
  No, there is an entire school of thinking that advocates the exact opposite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

h1fra 1y ago

That's good news for the project but having that many big corps in charge will for sure continue to bloat the software

DoctorOW 1y ago

Small tangent: I noticed the HN in the share menu is the only one in color. They're unable to change it unless they host a copy of the icon themselves (they're hotlinking https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.svg https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.svg). Surprised they don't have their own CDN/icon font at Facebook scale.

jaapz 1y ago
Weirdest part is they are hosting all the other icons themselves, just not the HN one
cnity 1y ago
You don't even need to "host" it per se, just include the icon source in the webpage. It's 315B.
- tschwimmer 1y ago
  You think bandwidth is free? -Sent from my 1T parameter LLM

kaoD 1y ago

After seeing all the comments here I'm a bit relieved. I don't care about the CEO's political stance, but Vercel's involvement with React has rubbed me the wrong way since the start of development of RSC. The development was basically behind half-closed doors, pretty much tied to Next.js (i.e. Vercel) and with zero specs except a high level description of what they were and their public API. I don't care that they were WIP: the community should've been involved, not Vercel as a benevolent dictator guiding their design from start to almost finish. Such a huge paradigm shift shouldn't have been dictated by any particular entity... and IMO much less Next's team which I think are prone to overengineering and bad decisions. IIRC there were points in time (maybe even currently?) where you had to use packages that were published to NPM but not even on any public repo. I love the idea of RSC but that's where my love ends. I thought I was alone on this.

k__ 1y ago
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- thrance 1y ago
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phplovesong 1y ago

Its kind of amazing how big a single library (that does very little really) has become. React is obviously the "new jquery", and something else will come one day. So many specially boot-camp devs are "react only" devs. Scary stuff.

romanovcode 1y ago
> Scary stuff. Why? When jQuery went away nothing happened. People just learned the new frameworks.
- huflungdung 1y ago
  [dead]
- hu3 1y ago
  I don't think jQuery went away. And it might never unless browsers implement better DOM apis. The current DOM API implementation reminds me of that quote: "look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power"
philipallstar 1y ago
It's not scary. It's a pretty small API surface. Lots of time is spent on component styling and all that stuff, which isn't React-specific. Web components tech such as Lit might be part of the future, replacing JSX, and then React purely becomes a middleware tool for DOM diffing and shuffling events up and data down.
- afavour 1y ago
  IMO OP is correct that the bootcamp devs are scary, not React itself. I’ve interviewed a number of engineers who have very little grasp of what the DOM is and how it works because React abstracts the whole thing away. Server components are another are where some niceties mean a bunch of developers aren’t really understanding what’s going on with underlying HTTP requests. While React’s API surface is small the average app will come with a chunk of extra stuff: Redux, next.js, yadda yadda. People take entire courses that never leave that bubble.

Vipsy 1y ago

The new foundation could be a turning point for React, but whether it truly decentralizes decision-making depends on how governance works in practice, not just on the list of corporate sponsors. Open source foundations have helped some projects thrive by formalizing community input, but they can also be slow to adapt if board dynamics favor stability over innovation. The real question is whether small developer voices and radical ideas will shape React's future, or if practical influence stays with the largest sponsors. Compared to one company's oversight, a well-run foundation can make React less vulnerable to a single vendor's agenda—but only if its structures actively foster broad participation and accountability. We'll see if React's evolution speeds up or settles into consensus-driven conservatism.

SonOfLilit 1y ago
Are you implicitly complaining that React is not moving fast enough? What the JS ecosystem needs is for some big players to CHILL a bit and take backwards compat more seriously.
- agos 1y ago
  when something is moving orthogonally to where you would like it to move, it might as well be not moving for you
  - brazukadev 1y ago
    With RSC it moved to the wrong direction
- robertoandred 1y ago
  React has had very few breaking changes.

notyouraibot 1y ago

I'm disappointed that Vercel is a part of this foundation. NextJS is on its way to its funeral, they have absolutely ruined it with things nobody asked for or cares about. I have been working on a large scale NextJS app which when I run locally consumes just over 8GB OF RAM on M4 Mac Mini. Brilliant. Slowly migrating the application to a Vite Based React SPA with a dedicated Hono backend and life is already looking already better.

gettingoverit 1y ago

I should remind that in a similarly cheerful mood FB dumped support of Jest and a bunch of other libraries. They have a long history of killing successful projects. Worse, Vercel is involved, and I literally don't remember anything good about that company. I'd recommend to be very cautious with such news, and use older versions of React for the next couple of years.

wallawe 1y ago
[flagged]
- gettingoverit 1y ago
  Until they dump your startup for no reason, and you'll have to migrate off their undocumented proprietary infrastructure. Please read stories on HN. You're risking your business if you work with them.
- mexicocitinluez 1y ago
  lol this has got to be satire
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- throw-10-8 1y ago
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  - wallawe 1y ago
    I've been using Vercel for > 5 years. Suppose it's possible but that's true for any platform.
    - AstroBen 1y ago
      ...no it isn't If you host your non-nextjs SPA on Cloudflare and they do something you hate.. you move Vercel has every incentive to lock everyone in as hard as possible and raise prices all they can. Not something I'd want to tie my business to

stevev 1y ago

It’s natural for Vercel to have a strong influence on the project. That’s what happens when a framework grows large and fragmented without a defined board, group, or leadership focused on both short- and long-term goals. At least now, with the foundation in place, there are additional voices to help guide the project rather than letting it move entirely in line with Vercel’s direction.

weinzierl 1y ago

Is there more information somewhere than in this short article, for example a timeline or the planned legal form?

antonyh 1y ago

Governance by mega-corporations working in a cartel. Having read this recent article [https://lithub.com/how-american-tech-cartels-use-apps-to-break-the-law/ https://lithub.com/how-american-tech-cartels-use-apps-to-bre...], I fail to see how this is a good thing. Gatekeepers with self-interests at the heart of the decision making process.

azemetre 1y ago
It's extremely worrying on how they had to use a private "foundation" rather than using existing, more democratic, organizations like OpenJS foundation. Don't expect user input, don't expect changes that go against their wants over the community's needs, and don't expect things to get better.

dzogchen 1y ago

Does this mean there is a chance we will get an ESM browser-compatible build of React after 10 years?

rglover 1y ago

If you just want tools that work/make it easy to build apps and websites with JS (and you want direct access to the guy building them), you may find what I built after leaving React/Next interesting [1]. I built this because the creeping complexity and confusion of React's APIs combined with the stress of building a SaaS w/ Next.js became a giant ball of stress and time waste. Feel free to jump in the Discord [2] with any questions. [1] https://cheatcode.co/joystick https://cheatcode.co/joystick [2] http://discord.cheatcode.co http://discord.cheatcode.co

nonethewiser 1y ago
I find it immediately off-putting that a I'd choose a framework based on whether or not I'm building a SaaS. Maybe it streamlines certain things but the lock-in to the frameworks set of features and way of doing things feels like a bad decision.
- rglover 1y ago
  A SaaS is just the focus but it can build plain websites just fine. IMO, it streamlines everything. But people have to get out of their own way and try it—not form surface-level opinions from a quick scroll. I'm actually shocked how few people will even try it. They sit and bitch about React/Next, but when someone offers a solution, they poo poo it (usually for superficial reasons) and then go back to suffering. Joystick is for developers who are tired of that cycle and just want to build something that just works (and they actually understand why it works). Honestly, I'm surprised more people don't trust my way of doing things and continue to walk on to the kill floor that is corporate and VC-backed tech.
  - nonethewiser 1y ago
    That's why I framed it as my immediate reaction. Of course 99.9% of people who read your comment aren't going to just go try it. It's totally fair to react to the elevator pitch.
    - 1y ago

qgin 1y ago

I am always surprised to see the anti-Vercel stuff here. NextJS has repeatedly solved every thing I wanted React to do beyond its out-of-the-box fearures. You can pry NextJS from my cold, dead hands.

thrance 1y ago
No matter the merits of NextJS, they are very valid political reasons why one might want to distance themselves from Vercel.
jakubmazanec 1y ago
That's normal. Happy customers don't have the same need to post comments as the angry ones.

ontouchstart 1y ago

React 16 was released in 2017, the same year transformer-based models was announced. We can feel nostalgia but the world is moving. It is hard to predict how everything will be in 5 years.

modo_mario 1y ago

If from this indeed follows more push for ssr and vercel related stuff as many seem to be projecting is there any credible fork that has some following already that aims to basically be React but without those elements as a focuspoint?

worble 1y ago
There's always preact, which is pretty much a drop in react replacement.

r_lee 1y ago

Is that logo/banner AI generated?

darepublic 1y ago

I still like React but I agree that it has lost its way somewhat. Hooks are very counter-intuitive and I don't think you can really call them a successful abstraction. You just get used to them over time. I don't use this react suspense stuff, nor have I kept up with the latest server side rendering with React tech. It doesn't appeal to me, I only use next + react with the pre-rendered export path and I think that niche still works fantastic. But at some point in the future they may take this away from me. This tends to happen with frameworks. A new one arises (next / react) and then over the course of many major version updates tends to just scope creep and try to do too much, or is monetized (next) and needs to find ways to justify people spending money on what was previously just free open source code.

wry_discontent 1y ago
React was such a simple and elegant solution when it started, and it's accreted so many quirks and weird behaviors that are clearly specific to the use cases of the companies leading development. At this point, I'm not interested in what they're doing anymore. I'm not starting new projects with React, and I'd move away from it for anything small.
tekkk 1y ago
I'd say React has become broken. The fact you have to by default wrap everything in a hook and cycle the boilerplate from one component to another is insane. useMemo, useCallback-use this and that. What are we even doing here in the first place? Playing whack-a-hook? And then you still can end up with stale closures. The fact they are over-engineering the server-side rendering is a cherry on top. React used to prize itself as the minimalistic solution but now they invent abstractions just to feel smart it seems.

postepowanieadm 1y ago

Happy to see more European(in this case Polish) companies getting involved.

gorbypark 1y ago

I am surprised to see three react native focused companies on the list. Expo, Software Mansion and Callstack are by far the big dogs in the RN ecosystem.

jakubmazanec 1y ago

It seems that as usual, there are just two groups: people who for some reason didn't like React and its way of things, but now found something else they do like (which is good!), but now still have the need to shit on React; the second group likes React and never had serious problems using it. I don't understand what is so complicated about hooks. It's a good abstraction with specific trade-off s. I think people forget that when React came out, it was awesome. Declarative, fast, and composable. I immediately wrote my own VDOM-based library ([1]), faster than React (probably with a lot more bugs, but my apps didn't have the same requirements as Facebook) - that's how inspiring React was. So many UI libraries :D Also it's funny that some people think that it's just a big cartel that will force developers to use React forever, and others think it's inevitable that something better will come up. [1] https://github.com/datanautika/ash https://github.com/datanautika/ash

brazukadev 1y ago
> there are just two groups: people who for some reason didn't like React and its way of things, but now found something else they do like (which is good!), but now still have the need to shit on React; the second group likes React and never had serious problems using it. There is a growing but already big third group of ex-React developers, even ex-React evangelists. You can see them in this thread and I think it is the majority of people talking about React's problems.
- jakubmazanec 1y ago
  > it is the majority of people talking about React's problems. Hmm, I'm not sure. I would say the majority thinks React is fine, and that majority isn't writing angry comments on HN.