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_I'm gonna narrow in on the bit about compilation steps_. Anyone shipping production code will one way of another have some kind of build step, whether that's
by akst 11mo ago
_I'm gonna narrow in on the bit about compilation steps_.
Anyone shipping production code will one way of another have some kind of build step, whether that's bundling, minification, typechecking, linting, finger printing files, etc. At that point it makes little difference if you add a build step for compilation.
I'm sympathetic to not wanting to deal with build processes I try to avoid them where I can in my side projects. The main web project I've been working on for the last year has no build step, uses Vanilla JS & web components. But it's also not a consumer facing product.
I think there's friction for sure, but I just can't see this being an issue for most cases where a build step is already in place for other concerns. And Developers are fairly familiar with build steps especially if you do anything outside the web in C/C++ or Java/C# or Rust or whatever.
- aatd86 11mo agoFor release but not for development. Sufficient for the build step to take a long time and you start to notice the friction. The web/browser should not rely on bundlers and compilation steps overall. This should remain optional.
- bottd 11mo agoHot reloading is pretty common now for React or other JavaScript projects
- MrJohz 11mo agoHot-reloads in a modern bundler like Vite will typically be instantaneous. Normally in development, only dependencies are bundles, and the files you write are served as-is (potentially with a per-file compilation step for e.g. jsx or TypeScript). That means that when you save a file, the bundler will run the compiler over that single file, then notify the hot-reload component in the browser to re-fetch it. That would be quick even if it were done in JavaScript, but increasingly bundlers use parts with in Go or Rust to ensure that builds happen every more quickly. If you've got a huge project, even very quick bundlers will end up slowing down considerably (although hot reload should still be pretty quick because it still just affects individual files). But in general, bundlers are pretty damn quick these days, and getting even quicker. And of course, they're still fully optional, even for a framework like React.
- aatd86 11mo agoNot really optional for react since it relies so heavily on jsx... You can write react without it but then is it react? What about the libraries you may want to import or code that a llm will generate for you? There should be better.