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React definitely didn't make frontend _great_ in a lot of cases, but jQuery, mootools, prototype, knockout, ember, angular, and a whole lot more JS frameworks t

by onion2k 4mo ago

React definitely didn't make frontend _great_ in a lot of cases, but jQuery, mootools, prototype, knockout, ember, angular, and a whole lot more JS frameworks that have come and gone predate React. If React hadn't been invented there'd be just as many poorly developed browser apps as there are today. You can't really pin that on React.

archerx 4mo ago
What I can pin on react is that it is very inefficient with resources using much more cpu power than needed to render some text and images on a webpage. Imagine all the electricity that was wasted because of react and the negative impact on the environment it has had because of that.
- onion2k 4mo ago
  React doesn't do anything unless the DOM needs to to be updated. Arguably React does have a 'disadvantage' in the sense that it doesn't do two-way data binding, and chooses to update as little of the DOM as necessary to render a change (which it's good at, and gets right), but that's sometimes more than just changing a text node or a value. I suspect that if React hadn't come along there'd be lots of homegrown frameworks doing something similar in a worse way. React is well thought-out and well designed. Also, every reactive framework can have the same problem. It's not a React thing; it's a library-that-tracks-changes-and-updates-the-DOM thing. Used poorly you'll end up in a re-render loop. We could just have static HTML pages and that would eliminate the whole problem, but then we'd be complaining about the electricity used on network roundtrips and people using badly coded desktop apps instead. Ultimately, libraries can be as bulletproof and fool-proof as you like, and developers will find new and novel ways to use them to build crap software. The responsibility (mostly) lies with the developers much more than the library.
  - archerx 4mo ago
    Yea, no, not at all. A lot of websites that use “modern” front end frame works cause high CPU usage. Getting data as need using an event based system is magnitudes faster and more efficient.
digitaltrees 4mo ago
Actually I can pin it on react directly. React was built by facebook to solve a single problem that most developers don’t have: their message count badge would be stale and out of date, their solution was to add global state, eliminate most of the browsers built in features, move away from multi page apps with http calls etc. so all kinds of things got harder like url routing, SEO, server side state management, etc. But most apps don’t need a persistent counter that updates without browser refresh. Further, there were other easy solutions like http request polling, or even websockets. They weren’t solutions for Facebook because they had to support lots of devices that couldn’t handle something like websockets. But instead of the industry realizing this was a specific tool for a specific niche case we just piled on to the design pattern and built a massive lock in ecosystem that may the web worse.

by onion2k 4mo ago

archerx 4mo ago

What I can pin on react is that it is very inefficient with resources using much more cpu power than needed to render some text and images on a webpage. Imagine all the electricity that was wasted because of react and the negative impact on the environment it has had because of that.

onion2k 4mo ago
React doesn't do anything unless the DOM needs to to be updated. Arguably React does have a 'disadvantage' in the sense that it doesn't do two-way data binding, and chooses to update as little of the DOM as necessary to render a change (which it's good at, and gets right), but that's sometimes more than just changing a text node or a value. I suspect that if React hadn't come along there'd be lots of homegrown frameworks doing something similar in a worse way. React is well thought-out and well designed. Also, every reactive framework can have the same problem. It's not a React thing; it's a library-that-tracks-changes-and-updates-the-DOM thing. Used poorly you'll end up in a re-render loop. We could just have static HTML pages and that would eliminate the whole problem, but then we'd be complaining about the electricity used on network roundtrips and people using badly coded desktop apps instead. Ultimately, libraries can be as bulletproof and fool-proof as you like, and developers will find new and novel ways to use them to build crap software. The responsibility (mostly) lies with the developers much more than the library.
- archerx 4mo ago
  Yea, no, not at all. A lot of websites that use “modern” front end frame works cause high CPU usage. Getting data as need using an event based system is magnitudes faster and more efficient.

digitaltrees 4mo ago

Actually I can pin it on react directly. React was built by facebook to solve a single problem that most developers don’t have: their message count badge would be stale and out of date, their solution was to add global state, eliminate most of the browsers built in features, move away from multi page apps with http calls etc. so all kinds of things got harder like url routing, SEO, server side state management, etc. But most apps don’t need a persistent counter that updates without browser refresh. Further, there were other easy solutions like http request polling, or even websockets. They weren’t solutions for Facebook because they had to support lots of devices that couldn’t handle something like websockets. But instead of the industry realizing this was a specific tool for a specific niche case we just piled on to the design pattern and built a massive lock in ecosystem that may the web worse.