36
kiki
2y

The brief history of Facebook open source:
- FB releases React under an oppressive licence that tells "woopsie, can't sue FB if you use React"
- a lot of money goes into making React popular to gain leverage from mass adoption
- VMware bans React in their company
- FB releases Flux to bring state management. It flops. Replaced by what some Russian student wrote in several evenings (Redux)
- Preact is released. It's faster than React, and it has MIT licence. Vue beats React in GitHub stars.
- Under mass pressure, FB changes React's licence to MIT. Initial plan to gain leverage fails spectacularly.
- FB releases Flow Types. It flops. Replaced by TypeScript.
- FB releases their own app market for React Native. It flops.
- FB releases Relay. It flops. Replaced by Apollo.
- FB tries to push React.Suspense for the whole JS landscape to obey and comply to how it works. Community says "Fuck You".
- FB releases react-native-web. It flops.
- Web Components are out in all browsers, adopted as a standard. React doesn't support them.
- Google releases Lit, a virtual DOM framework on top of Web Components to fuck with React. It's a massive success.
- React 18 is out. Still no Web Components support.
- (you are here)

Comments
  • 0
    Suspense is made tolerable by React-query, which you can use as a shim with sensible data fetching libraries that don't incorporate a particular UI library.
  • 8
    Oh no poor meta :((( sad little thingy, doesnt get what it wants :(((
  • 2
    Yet, with all that, React is pretty much always at the top of any list of webdev framework/library/toolkit/whatever over the past couple of years (though jQuery sometimes still comes out on top due to Wordpress usage). Kinda hard to square that circle, no?
  • 3
    @fzammetti remember, React has nothing on jQuery if we compare their popularity on jQuery's heyday. Yet, jQuery crumbled.

    Yahoo. Internet Explorer. Flash. Tumblr.

    React.
  • 6
    React native web sounds just like how i overengineer shit
  • 1
    @melezorus34 doesn’t it feel like a common theme here
  • 3
    Once upon a time their PHP transpiler looked promising. But then they pulled a Google and abandoned it.
  • 0
    Ok yeah, in the case you missed, knockoutjs hax shadow dom and components support since like 4 yars. But it's a very small lib compareed to react/vue. Personally I kind of like how knockout works.

    It's a librairy, not a framework.
  • 0
    @NoToJavaScript if you’re never heard of it, how come you’re so confident about its usage stats? 😂😂

    You didn’t think this one through did ya
  • 0
    @kiki Yeah I did. because iof I never heard of it, 10 people in my company never heard of it (I got spamed with "Oh you we should migrate to <insert name>".

    If these 10 people never heard of it, than it's a blip on a radar :)

    I'm not saying it's bad, i'm just saying that I never heard of it. And if it was a "huge sucess" (see react) I would've heard about it !

    headshot !
  • 5
    @NoToJavaScript biased. People you work with / talk to are at least somewhat like you in one way or another. The selection pool is not representative. I can go to a bunch of outsource php developers and ask about Tailwind, to no avail.
  • 0
    @kiki true.

    But tailwind is not wide spread. It's a good thing in theorie, it completly fails on big applications.

    And I know what it is and how it works. Because i'be heared about it.

    It's like "go", i'be hearded about it, I did a bit pf research. But I knind of know what this language is.

    "lit" is so so small, there is only 11K stackoverflow querstions.

    So talking about "great sucess" nop.

    Even my prefered knockoutjs has more questions then lit.

    (ofc, it's a dumb metriic, but it shows how many noobs are using it).

    My only point is :

    You cannot say that react is a fail (Even if personally I would burn on fire any dev who even considered using react). React, obkectivly, has a very wide spread, well know and adpoted.

    Lit ? No one heared about it. Good luck finding a front end dev with "lit" competances.

    Again, noyt saying it's bad, I don't know. never tested.
  • 0
    @NoToJavaScript you’re comparing incomparable. Lit is a tiny library on top of web components. It is not a framework. Any question you might have, going to be a question about web components. Lit is just helper functions.

    React, on the other hand, is a thick layer of abstraction built from the ground up, and it lives by its own rules. Lit lives by the rules of web components.

    If you want a fair comparison, compare React and Web Components. Don’t forget to compare their trend lines since inception.
  • 0
    @NoToJavaScript what you said is like saying yeah, twig is popular. So much stackoverflow questions. But `` backticks in js have almost no questions, this means no one uses them. Both are template tools.
  • 1
    @NoToJavaScript I see why you made that mistake. It was a huge race back in 2016, what frontend framework is the best. React, Vue, angular, ember, knockout, moon, hyperapp, preact, backbone, etc. A very turbulent time.

    But web components are not a framework. It’s a language feature like mutation observer, local storage or es modules. There is no point in comparing frameworks to web components. Web components already won by merely being a standard that people liked and adopted.

    Lit is merely a figment of whole new web components landscape.

    Think of react as of top framework for html4 and that old js that came with it. Does it work? Yes. Popular? Yes.

    Will it be replaced by a new standard where it’s not gonna be needed anymore because new standard is more powerful? Inevitably so.
  • 0
    As I know, web component is stupid and removed from all browsers and web standard right after it added to web things. And I watched a very long video from a guy from google, that explain why web components never resolve any modern web problem.
    Despite you like react or not, it would exists and more popular.
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