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Discussion on: Stop Using React

 
leob profile image
leob

Cool, but you have to understand the use cases for which this makes a substantial/perceivable difference. For a large class of apps you won't really notice any difference, your screen would render in 0.05 seconds rather than in 0.1 seconds, if I may put it that way.

I'm not saying that there's no point in technical progress (there is, absolutely) but for most React projects it would probably be a bad idea to say "we got this new and faster framework here, let's rewrite our app from scratch".

Even for greenfield projects you might still choose React rather than Svelte or Yew simply because of the large number of devs who know it, and the because of the vastly larger community and ecosystem (answers on Stackoverflow, huge number of ready-made solutions/components/tools etcetera).

It also depends on your team of course, how technically competent are they, do they know Rust or WASM, and so on.

The point I just want to make is, when choosing a tech stack for a project you're normally looking at much more than sheer technical superiority.

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bajix profile image
Thomas Sieverding

You’re completely understating the performance differences. It’s more like going from 3000ms-400ms to 300ms-25ms; that’s a massive difference, which will have a major impact on user interaction. Furthermore, the initial time to first render is substantially affected by the parsing time when loading JS, whereas WASM compiles as it’s downloading and is ready immediately. Finally, a WASM app can be server side rendered by an edge working, allowing for low latency edge computing that’s both economical and scalable. These aren’t minor performance differences.

In any case, I definitely agree with your sentiment on why React is successful; it’s an 800lb gorilla, it’s safe, there’s a lot of resources to google your way out of a rabbit hole, there’s a lot out there to guide those in need of guidance, and there’s a lot of devs by virtue of boot camps etc.

In any case, I think it’s still worth learning things like Rust WASM / Mogwai / Yew because if you actually do know how to use these things and can build apps end to end yourself it’s a way to take on major tech players. If you're going to compete with an major tech company, you sort of need to go big

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leob profile image
leob

I'll definitely keep it in mind ... BTW Rust is brilliant :-)

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bajix profile image
Thomas Sieverding

Right!? I know more than a dozen programming languages, but all of them left so much wanting; Rust is truly the only language that left me in awe of its' brilliance. Lately I've been porting all of my NodeJS work over to Rust and I foresee it as being the sole backend language that I write in going forward. It's super empowering all you can do it with it: so far I've used it for GraphQL API development, lamda functions (13mb peak RAM, <5ms response from cold start mindblown), Redis Native Module development, EOS smart contacts, Holochain DAPPs, extending Postgres, creating NodeJS modules via WASM-bindgen and I feel like I'm only really scratching the surface here. I'm not sure how well you know Redis, but doing redis native modules via github.com/RedisLabsModules/redism... is actually a complete game changer and is applicable for so many use cases. I've never been so excited by a language

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leob profile image
leob

Great to hear ... put more of that stuff up on your Github? github.com/Bajix

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bajix profile image
Thomas Sieverding

It's all closed source. I don't do open source projects on the side anymore; instead I build companies, solo-author apps, and patent new inventions. Right now my most pressing priority is stopping coronavirus, and everything else takes lesser priority. This project I've been financing & working on with my dad for the past 7 years and we're trying to get this onto the market ASAP: youtube.com/watch?v=MuHWW-25mBw

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leob profile image
leob

Cool, understood ... nice, you're an innovator inventing stuff, we need more of those :-)

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