VanillaJSX.com

by novocantico • 2 years ago

538 225 2 years ago

arjvik• 2 years ago

What benefit does the virtual DOM add?

spoiler2• 2 years ago

DOM interactions (read, writes) are synchronous, they're very slow, and it must happen on the main thread. This can cause the browser tab to freezing if access and updates aren't carefully "curated" (ie you don't want to read-check-then-write in a tight loop; or even write too often, even if it's the same value).

It can also simplify some stuff surrounding event handling (but that's not it's main goal I think)

So people wrote various ways to defer/batch/denounce updates.

Virtual DOM is a general solution/implementation. It's not the only one, but I think you always need at least a tiny runtime to avoid too much DOM access (ie Svelte, Solid JS are fairly minimal)

meiraleal4• 2 years ago

but I think you always need at least a tiny runtime to avoid too much DOM access

Unless you use lit-html, which has a very efficient diffing algorithm that only updates the nodes that have changed.

samwillis• 2 years ago

The virtual dom makes implementing a declarative templating system easer, and declarative templates are easer for a developer to reason about, and less error prone, than having to mutate the dom directly.

People often mistakingly describe the vdom as faster than the dom, this is incorrect. It would be faster than throwing away the whole components dom and rebuilding, so the same templating code building a new dom, rather than a vdom that's then diffed. Hand crafter mutations will be faster than a vdom diff, simply because the computer is doing les work, however much more error prone.

spoiler2• 2 years ago

People often mistakingly describe the vdom as faster than the dom, this is incorrect.

You'll get better performance with _carefully crafted_ DOM access, but that's easier said than done, especially on a larger applications.

vDOM takes care of the "carefully crafted" part with some trade offs, especially if it also defers rendering and doesn't wccess the DOM on every update.

So yes, it's easier to write declarative UIs with it, but it's also there to address common performance issues with unchecked/eager DOM access. Even if you don't throw away the whole tree and insert a new one, it can be very slow. Just _reading_ from the DOM is slow _and_ everything stops while that's being done too.

miki1232112• 2 years ago

Virtual DOM is to classical JS what garbage collection is to malloc and free.

Garbage collection is less efficient, but it is sometimes very difficult to figure out exactly when a piece of memory stops being used, which leads to use-after-free, double-free and memory leak bugs.

Same goes for classical UI approaches. In classical UI, most pieces of state are kept in at least two places, once in code and at least once in the DOM.

For example, in a shopping cart, the total might appear three times, implicitly in the code (as a function that sums the prices of all the items), once as the label of the "open cart" button in the navbar, and once as text in the "your cart" modal, which that button shows or hides. THe cart may be modifiable from different places, the cart modal itself, product pages, product collection pages, order history (when re-ordering recently purchased items) etc.

In the classical approach, you need to make sure that all modifications to the cart accurately change the state in all three places. You also need to ensure that if you remove a product from the cart using the modal and you're currently on a page that lets you order the product in any way, the "remove from cart" button on that page needs to turn back into "add to cart", and there may be hundreds of different such buttons, which the cart modal needs to handle somehow. It is very easy to make mistakes here and have the state in the code (array of products) fall out of sync with what the user sees on the page.

In React, there's just one array of products, one function to calculate the total, and a lot of places in the code that use this array. WHenever the array changes, the pieces of the page that rely on it automatically re-render, while everything else stays the same. There's no way for the UI and the array to fall out of sync, and there's no need to track where the array is being used and where it's being modified.

edflsafoiewq2• 2 years ago

It enabled a style of view library where you write immediate-mode type code that always recreates a whole component from scratch, versus having to write finicky code that both creates and then updates pieces of the page as state changes (dirty tracking, etc). Behind the scenes, you're creating the vDOM from scratch, which is diffed against the actual retained-mode DOM, and then only the pieces that are different are updated.

ProofHouse2• 2 years ago

Slows down your app too, sometimes. Depends how well you can work with and mutate a DOM, but if all things equal no VDOM is always faster cause no diffing.

ProofHouse2• 2 years ago

A lot of people can benefit from offsetting mutations with rAF and dbl rAF and batching reads/writes (FastDOM), before needing or considering a VDOM. VDOM came to prominence because of REACT and then started becoming used even when it wasn't needed. It does serve a purpose and scenario when needed, tho

__s• 2 years ago

With vDOM I could say `x = JSX` then cache that in state, inserting it in multiple places. Switching to Solid you have to make sure to use `x = () => JSX` & there's some mental model adjustments since logic outside JSX isn't reactive

acdha2• 2 years ago

If you couldn’t efficiently batch updates, a vDOM could avoid repetitive updates in close succession, especially on IE6 (the browser React was designed for).

If you can control your app’s structure, it primarily adds significant increases in the RAM and CPU required for your app and slows load time because you are using a huge amount of JavaScript to emulate the carefully tuned C++ code built in to the browser. If you notice, most of the benchmarks from when React launched claiming performance wins were compared to heavyweight frameworks or complex jQuery plug-in combinations where a single user interaction might trigger cascading updates forcing the browser to rerender things which didn’t change along or to reflow multiple times in cascading update-measure-update chains. Pure DOM implementations were always faster, often by multiple orders of magnitude and once you could drop IE6, and then IE11, the DOM APIs and CSS were rich enough that much of the library code is now a net negative as well (e.g. people used to use complex code trying to build layouts which CSS grids solved).

config_yml2• 2 years ago

Reminds me of Action Script 3 which had XML at the core of the language. It was a fun language to work with, but famously failed to become ES4. Oh well, took us 10+ years to arrive close to that with Typescript and JSX.

quink• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript_for_XML - Firefox had it too, but people at large just didn't want it, so it got removed. It got disabled for web pages with the release of Firefox 17, 6 months prior to the first release of React.

sltkr• 2 years ago

Personally I never heard about it. So it might not be that people didn't want it, but that it wasn't promoted much.

Also, it sounds like the only browser to ever support it was Firefox? That was probably much more of a limiting factor for adoption.

mhitza• 2 years ago

People didn't want it because browsers didn't support it (except FF, as you noted). Some of us had our fingers crossed that other browsers would pick it up.

shove• 2 years ago

I don’t recall being able to construct XML inline like this unless maybe that was a Flex server thing?

dugmartin• 2 years ago

It was an extension to ES4 called E4X - it allowed inline xml along with a new xml data type. More info here: https://evertpot.com/ecmascript-4-the-missing-version/

noduerme• 2 years ago

I think parent must be referring to Flex components. AS3 itself had an XML library which I recall being absolute hell to work with. The better way to send things over the wire with AS3 was with AMF.

zoogeny• 2 years ago

I don't recall being able to do the XML construction inline either, but that just might be my memory.

However, the XML selector syntax was a godsend. Recursively parsing an XML tree is really a pain. E4X would allow you to do things like:

    var foo = someXml..childNodes.@attribute;

I'm not even sure if that would work actually. There were a bunch of operators for doing things like getting a collection of children that all had the same tag so you could work with XML like:

    <someXml>
       <intermediateNodeYouWantToSkip>
           <childNode attribute="1" />
           <childNode attribute="2" />
           <childNode attribute="3" />
           <unrelatedNode />
       </intermediateNodeYouWantToSkip>
    </someXml>

Another post here said people didn't want it, but I don't think that was the real reason it was dropped. There was a lot of drama at the time about Flash in general and a massive debacle about EcmaScript 4 (which ActionScript more or less adopted). There was also the whole XHTML thing happening.

Basically JSON as a format won out over XML and ES4/XHTML were ditched. Frankly, a world that revolved around XML/SOAP would have been a nightmare, so I guess killing off the easy processing of XML in JavaScript helped to stave off that potential future. XSS, XSLT and E4X were all casualties.

waynenilsen• 2 years ago

This plays very nicely with the locality of behavior model of htmx

sophiebits3• 2 years ago

These examples are cool but I think it’s important to note that none of them show components whose props can change over time, since that ability doesn’t seem to be modeled at all. Clever if you don’t need that but I’m having trouble seeing how it would scale to more complex apps.

numpad• 2 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but how would this prevent you from using setTimeout/setInterval? But I agree that these projects often work great in small use cases, but quickly crumble under "real world" scenarios.

novocantico11• 2 years ago

I admit that the two most complex "interactive apps" I've built with this are not that complex according to many standards:

* https://www.immaculatalibrary.com/books.html (src = https://github.com/sdegutis/immaculatalibrary.com/blob/main/...)

* https://www.immaculatalibrary.com/prayers/ (src = https://github.com/sdegutis/immaculatalibrary.com/blob/main/...)

_heimdall3• 2 years ago

I'd be hesitant to run something like a 30fps render loop in a web app. Its been years since I last saw or tried that in a real world app but it didn't end well for performance.

Your best bet would be to queue up specific UI changes that need to be made as diff's rather than checking the entire UI state. At that point, though, you might as well run them immediately as the change is needed.

If that was still a perf problem you would end up chasing a very complex solution like react fiber to partially update the UI on a loop while periodically pausing for user events.

sophiebits3• 2 years ago

Sure, if you blow away the entire app on every state change. But that would lose not only state defined in components (like `i` in ClickMe) but also all state implicitly stored in DOM elements (selection, focus, scroll position, input value, media playback).

throwitaway1123• 2 years ago

I would almost certainly never implement a UI as a render loop, but if you wanted to go down that path requestAnimationFrame is a much more idiomatic way to do it if you want to match the user's display refresh rate.

hellojebus• 2 years ago

I'm by no means an advocate of this library, and never plan to use it, but to support component props that trigger rerenders, a'la React/Vue, I would use JS Proxies here. Wouldn't be that hard to implement.

sophiebits3• 2 years ago

How would you suggest using Proxy?

novocantico11• 2 years ago

The technique I used here and in all my browser-side code is the exact same technique used by VS Code internally, and it scales very well. The only difference in my code is it's more concise than writing 10 lines to construct and setup a DOM element the typical way.

Honestly, the real interesting part about my framework is literally everything else. Returning strings from JSX on the ssg-side; being able to import raw source directories and manipulate string|Buffer at ssg-time; the extremely efficient and lightning fast module system I wrote on top of chokidar and swc; probably more I'm forgetting, but basically the JSX-as-DOM is only the most visually interesting part. But really just a party trick.

[edit] Case in point: the source code to vanillajsx.com is extremely concise and clear and short, I literally wrote the whole thing today with zero deps (besides imlib), and the JSX-as-DOM demos are the least innovative part of it: https://github.com/sdegutis/vanillajsx.com/tree/main/site

novocantico11• 2 years ago

I just added a more complex todo app to the bottom of the page. So it should give an idea of how a more complex hierarchy can respond to events elsewhere in the hierarchy and update themselves and each other accordingly.

tombl• 2 years ago

Yup, in order to scale this approach to any real size (and still have confidence that everything is working together like you expect), a proper reactivity solution is needed.

For those that appreciate this approach of JSX returning concrete DOM elements, Solid works exactly like this, with the addition of a proper reactivity layer.

ibash3• 2 years ago

People forget what problem the virtual dom and react is supposed to solve.

No better article than this: https://blog.vjeux.com/2013/javascript/react-performance.htm...

Spivak• 2 years ago

And then Svelte showed that you could avoid all that with a compilation step and live update the dom efficiently.

https://svelte.dev/blog/virtual-dom-is-pure-overhead

React is also at the point where re-rendering the whole app is a fiction the library maintains for you while being smarter and doing less, why not go the whole way?

ibash3• 2 years ago

Agree, react is way too bloated right now. The original idea and first versions were great.

Aeolun• 2 years ago

And then SolidJS showed that you could do the same thing even without a compilation step.

guax• 2 years ago

For me is because is hard to remember that problem while dealing the the ones react brings.

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

There are plenty of cases where optimizing for performance isn't necessary. This is where React is not worth the extra headache and complexity.

presentation2• 2 years ago

React is set to become much less complex as a user once the react compiler is in place and if you use server components/actions; in my product we’ve already basically eliminated 95% of useEffect calls, almost all data fetching, client side state management with the current gen tools, and once the compiler is in then all memoization will be gone too.

You still end up with the bloated bundle size but with one of the more modern react alternatives you can eliminate that too. So at least for me, I don’t mind the build complexity for the power I get; especially now that node itself is supporting typescript, the build side is getting simpler to set up as well.

mbivert3• 2 years ago

(honest question, not trying to be snarky) Do you have one (many would be great) use cases where the practical gain of the virtual DOM solutions have a genuine impact?

I'm asking because, many of React (or friends) introductory material naturally focus on building things like TODO lists or Tic Tac Toe; while those offer insights into how to work with React (& cie), they're not showcasing cases where the performance gains are perceptible, and IMO not even cases where the "organizational" benefits of such libraries are salient.

eterps• 2 years ago

This question is crucial to understanding the true value of React and virtual DOM technologies.

While there's no doubt that React and virtual DOM offer advantages, it's essential to clearly demonstrate where and how these benefits manifest in real-world applications.

they're not showcasing cases where the performance gains are perceptible

According to this commenter, it's not even about the performance gains:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41271272

and IMO not even cases where the "organizational" benefits of such libraries are salient

Apparently, that is what it ultimately boils down to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41271367

NohatCoder2• 2 years ago

Obviously this always depends on what code you compare it to. I don't think there can be much doubt that a well written performance oriented framework-free implementation is in practice always going to be faster than anything using virtual DOM, as one can update simply the parts that need updating without creating the virtual DOM in the first place.

If you assume programmers who don't know what they are doing it is a very different question. Some people will manage to make a train wreck both with and without a framework. But if we assume that there is a skill level where people will manage to make something useful with a framework, but not without it, or vice versa, then I really do not know which way it swings.

ibash3• 2 years ago

Yes:

One project I worked on was a BI tool with a fair amount of complex state. Before we introduced react we were using backbone, event listeners, and managing dom state ourselves. With react we made it declarative, which simplified things.

Another project was an email client with a lot of complex state and caching. That started with and continued to use react so I don’t have a direct performance comparison. But again, managing the state manual would have been a nightmare.

cribbles• 2 years ago

These "what ifs" are kinda funny because the origins of JSX can be traced back to Facebook's XHP[1], which took explicit inspiration from E4X[2], an early JS standard that looked and behaved similar to the library described here.

[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2010/02/09/developer-tools/xhp-a-...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript_for_XML

spankalee3• 2 years ago

E4X had the unfortunate downside of returning actual DOM instances, which needed to be updated imperatively. That's why JSX eclipsed it, and there hasn't been a serious proposal for HTML templating in JS since then.

But maybe we can revive the general idea with a modern take: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/1069

lolinder3• 2 years ago

had the unfortunate downside of returning actual DOM instances, which needed to be updated imperatively.

Isn't this what we have in TFA?

olliej6• 2 years ago

Also E4X was only ever implemented in Firefox, never really got traction even in Firefox.

But even considering the single implementation problem, it also was just not a good language model, nor was it well specified or defined and it brought with it a pile of weird baggage and complexity.

Then because it was The Future there was no real thought into proper interop with JS (it was essentially a completely independent spec so adopted general syntax but specified in a way that meant JS could not simply adopt that syntax).

kreetx• 2 years ago

With "imperatively" you mean that the user of the templating system has to do it imperatively, and that is bad? Asking because imperative updates seem to be the way to go within the implementation, instead of creating new instances of elements every time.

Sephr• 2 years ago

E4X had the unfortunate downside of returning actual DOM instances, which needed to be updated imperatively

Firefox never shipped the optional E4X DOM APIs. I wrote a polyfill for them at the time.[1]

1. https://github.com/eligrey/e4x.js/blob/master/e4x.js

SkiFire133• 2 years ago

which needed to be updated imperatively

VanillaJSX seems to suffer from the same problem though.

megaman8212• 2 years ago

There are separate proposals from web components that get rid of imperative updates. https://eisenbergeffect.medium.com/the-future-of-native-html...

olliej6• 2 years ago

Fun fact, E4X is the reason JavaScript has ‘for(of)’ instead of ‘for each’ (the reason we didn’t get ‘for (:)’ is even dumber - it would conflict with ‘:type’ annotations a few TC39 members were convinced would magically be in the language)

rlt• 2 years ago

Like the type annotations that are now in TypeScript?

IshKebab3• 2 years ago

There is a proposal to add them, though it does seem to be stalled.

spullara• 2 years ago

I was bummed when they removed E4X from the browser implementations.

novocantico11• 2 years ago

Thanks for taking some interest in my project. It came from being frustrated with the state of SSGs over the past 10 years. I mostly just make static websites, and I wanted something that was simple and intuitive to me, and JSX seemed like a great fit. But I got very tired of the disproportionately scaled complexity of JSX frameworks like React. Long story short, I made an SSG that just renders JSX as strings. It was natural to extend that to the browser to just render JSX as DOM elements. And in a few cases (mostly layout) it lends well to shared components. Overall I'm happy with what I came up with, although some of it is admittedly a little hacky, and IDE support isn't as good as it could be.

[edit] Oh also, this solution works really well for SEO. That's another problem I didn't find solved well in other JSX frameworks.

thelastinuit• 2 years ago

not the hero we deserve but the villain we need

hyperhello3• 2 years ago

What I’m seeing here is not new. It’s this vanilla pattern but with enough back support to leave off the framing and get the syntax highlighting:

Var button = html(’<button>im a button</button>’);

The html() function is trivial, but it just doesn’t feel like real programming to do this, even though there’s nothing else to it in the end.

hyperhello3• 2 years ago

Downvote me but tell me why. The example is using .onclick, .textContent, etc in a completely vanilla way. I'm just pointing out you can get all the way vanilla and it still works. What's the issue?

mock-possum• 2 years ago

Tagged template literals for html view templating is what I LOVE about Lit and lit-html. It’s JavaScript you can run natively in browser, no server or pre processor/build step necessary.

fredmerc2• 2 years ago

A JSX for Django server side would be cool.

WesleyJohnson• 2 years ago

How would you envision this working?

megaman8212• 2 years ago

Not exactly JSX, but I came across a package django-cotton[https://github.com/wrabit/django-cotton], that is html syntax first components.

shepherdjerred4• 2 years ago

Just curious, have you seen Astro? I feel like it's the perfect SSG, but maybe you have some reservations that VanillaJSX solves.

newzisforsukas2• 2 years ago

astro is nearly, if not as, "complex" as react, no?

_heimdall3• 2 years ago

I'm a big fan of Astro, though I could see it being a bit more of an adjustment for JSX users than Svelte users since Astro's syntax was originally based on Svelte.

That said, JSX can be used easily with Astro as long as you get used to at least a bit of The `.astro` syntax for wrapper components and pages/layouts.

vips7L• 2 years ago

SSG?

novocantico11• 2 years ago

For all "have you tried ___" questions, the answer is the same. I've been trying all these new techs for the past 10-15 years, regularly, as soon as they come out, for the first few years with much with excitement, and later with disillusionment and less regularity.

Another user below said

We've recently moved one service from next to Astro and it was just removing a ton of boilerplate and 'dance around' code.

And I get why it happens. When you first try out a new framework, you allow yourself to learn and add its inherent complexity, knowingly and intentionally. You say to yourself, "it's part of the dream, it's going to work out; there's a vision, just trust the process." This is true with literally all frameworks.

But they never deliver. The complexity is never worth it, and in the end, the intentionally added complexity is always intentionally and gladly removed when it becomes clear that it was unnecessary complexity. This is what I am glad to have learned so thoroughly that I no longer try to learn new frameworks when I initially see its complexity, imagine adopting it in view of my experience, and recognize that its almost always not worth it.

Look at the code on vanillajsx.com. Besides JSX and types, it's plain JavaScript and DOM manipulation. Translating it to document.createElement would add almost no lines of code. There's no unnecessary complexity. That's the whole point of the site. The simplicity of discovering and removing unnecessary complexity is wonderful and refreshing, and I think a lot of people agree.

todotask• 2 years ago

Large WASM payload on your site could be optimized.

AltruisticGapHN3• 2 years ago

Have you looked into lit-html?

Coming from Vue I was really surprised it does a lot of what Vue templating does, including attaching events, with just vanilla JS templates. And when you use VSCode lit extension, you get syntax highlighting and full type checking inside the templates.

I learned about lit-html after a tweet from Marc Grabanski, where he said he used lit-html with vanillajs, not Lit.

After some experimenting I found it works great and it seems like you are trying to solve something very similar.

When you use the lit-html template package you can do basically evetything that is described in the Templates chapter

https://lit.dev/docs/templates/overview/

... without all the other abstraction of components that are part of lit-element.

https://lit.dev/docs/libraries/standalone-templates/#renderi...

dimal4• 2 years ago

Love the idea. FYI, on your demo page, the todo app is 404. And you might want to spell out static site generator instead of saying "SSG" on your docs. I didn't know what SSG was, even though I've used static site generators. I had to ask the AI.

nashashmi• 2 years ago

I wonder what The examples would look like in ECMAscript 5.

spankalee3• 2 years ago

Returning actual DOM nodes entirely blunts the big advantage of JSX (and non-JSX libraries like Lit) - which is their immediate mode style API, and UI=f(state) model.

You want to return a description of the DOM, rather than the real DOM, because you want to be able to reevaluate your templates repeatedly with new state, and efficiently update the DOM where that template is rendered to.

All the examples here use imperative DOM APIs to do updates, like with this:

    function TodoInput(attrs: { add: (v: string) => void }) {
      const input = <input /> as HTMLInputElement;
      input.placeholder = 'Add todo item...';
      input.onkeydown = (e) => {
        if (e.key === 'Enter') {
          attrs.add(input.value);
          input.value = '';
        }
      };
      return input;
    }

    class TodoList {
      ul = <ul class='todolist' /> as HTMLUListElement;
      add(v: string) {
        const item = <li>{v}</li> as HTMLLIElement;
        item.onclick = () => item.remove();
        this.ul.append(item);
      }
    }

Avoiding those `input.onkeydown = ...` and `this.ul.append(item)` cases, and instead just iterating over items in your template, is probably the main benefit of a VDOM.

(The problem with VDOMs is that diffing is slow, a problem solved by using templates that separate static from dynamic parts, like Lit - a library I work on).

recursive3• 2 years ago

You want to return a description of the DOM, rather than the real DOM, because you want to be able to reevaluate your templates repeatedly with new state, and efficiently update the DOM where that template is rendered to.

Depends who "you" are. I prefer to have my DOM nodes updated in place without all the reconciliation machinery. (no implication about what you want)

spankalee3• 2 years ago

You don't need diffing or reconciliation to turn a description of DOM into DOM. Lit works without a VDOM.

If all JSX does is return a DocumentFragment that you then need to imperatively add event listeners to and imperatively update, how is it much better than innerHTML?

ericmcer• 2 years ago

If you work on a team of suitable size I would hesitate to not leverage a VDom. I trust myself to not trigger dumb reflows, but the way I see a lot of people using React this could be a perf nightmare.

JasonSage• 2 years ago

I agree with the sibling comment that this really depends on the user. To take a different approach: JSX is just a different DSL to the createElement function call pattern (see Preact.h for example) and all of the benefits you’re describing come from the framework and runtime.

More concisely: JSX is just an alternate function call syntax with some useful applications.

For example at my last company we used JSX to make test data factories that had an XML-like look but were using a builder-pattern in the element creation that was able to make contextual decisions about what was in the final data. Nothing to do with React, DOM, or inability to express the same thing declaratively without JSX.

spoonfeeder006• 2 years ago

For example at my last company we used JSX to make test data factories

Thats really interesting, can you elaborate more?

For example did you use a specific JSX compiler? Was that written in house or used a 3rd party library?

LAC-Tech• 2 years ago

Returning actual DOM nodes entirely blunts the big advantage of JSX (and non-JSX libraries like Lit) - which is their immediate mode style API, and UI=f(state) model.

I feel like this is one of the leakiest abstractions in all of computing. There's a reason there's an entire cottage industry around react; how to stop things rendering multiple times, refreshing needlessly, etc.

littlestymaar7• 2 years ago

Yeah, as much as I liked the idea of an “immediate mode API which is in fact retained under the hood which makes things both ergonomic and performant”, the reality is that React failed to deliver on that and every sufficiently big app ends up having performance problems that are then fixed by opting out of the immediate mode illusion.

austin-cheney4• 2 years ago

Whether you like this project or not, your comment so completely misses the point. You are confusing the JSX syntax, which is what the author wanted by extracting it away from React, for all the React candy. This is a missing the forest for the trees kind of thing.

This mind numbing reliance upon layers of abstraction nonsense around state management is why I really don't like React. State management is ridiculously simple. State management, when done correctly, is the most primitive example of MVC with no abstractions needed.

SkiFire133• 2 years ago

State management is not simple. You have to constantly keep in sync two different piece of states (your data model and the UI). Making sure that when you modify some parts of your model then everything depending on that is also updated is one of the hardest things to guarantee. Fundamentally this is because it is non-local: you cannot tell what will change by just looking at the definition of what you're mutating.

You might be able to handle this while you're alone and you know everything about your codebase, but the moment you're working with someone else or in a team this will no longer be the case.

novocantico11• 2 years ago

is probably the main benefit of a VDOM

I get the "no more imperative updates" dream. I've used these frameworks for probably a decade. I've mastered them.

Me personally, I prefer imperatively updating my DOM. I get completely fine-grained control over what's happening. I can architect it to be an extremely efficient machine. I can make it extremely easy to add/change/remove/fix features in my apps without forcing myself to think according to anyone else's opinionated methodology.

nine_k• 2 years ago

If you have little state, or simple uniform state, you can actually store it in the real DOM efficiently, as values of controls, or lists of similar DOM nodes under a common known parent. If most of your DOM is static, and you only need small bits of interactivity, React is an excessively heavy tool.

The farther you get into complex GUI territory, the more you want a declarative, functional approach, because it makes things simpler. The closer you are to a handful of controls with simple logic, the more you want to just imperatively tell them what to do, and leave the rest of the page alone, because it makes things simpler. We now just have better tools than jQuery for that.

newzisforsukas2• 2 years ago

there is no reason something imperative cannot be declarative. the war is one of style, not capability, so saying you gain "fine-grained control" is kind of meaningless, imo

francasso• 2 years ago

From my experience creating complex web UIs, the performance angle of using a vdom is pure fantasy if your application is complex enough.

In fact I now strongly believe it's counter productive, because most people come to it thinking "I can just trigger however many re-renders of this large piece of UI as I like, the vdom makes it ok" and it doesn't, the performance sucks, but now you have architected the app in a way that requires a rewrite to make the app perform well.

I have seen this exact sequence of events four times, by four different teams. The second, third and fourth, as a principal architect consulting for the team I tried to intervene and advocate for a vanilla architecture that is mindful about performance, citing the issues they would likely experience with react, but to no avail. There was a lot of "oh but there many ways to avoid those issues" followed by a list of things I was presumably ignorant about.

I guess most of us need to learn things the hard way.

kristiandupont• 2 years ago

And from my experience building complex web UIs, those team members were right -- there are many ways to avoid the issues and using vdom is great in general. True, there are situations where it falls short, which is why you will want to fall back to other techniques for those bits of architecture. Just like your JS, Python or Ruby server will call a bunch of functions written in C or the like. That doesn't mean you should write your entire backend in C.

unconed• 2 years ago

Yes and the solution is to put on your big boy pants and to actually do your front-end application architecture properly.

Separate source of truth from derived data. Separate possibly valid user intent from validated state. Use contexts to organize the data dependency graph of your application. Ensure all your widgets use a consistent value type in and out, don't let events contaminate it. Use something like cursors or optics to simplify mutations and derive setters automatically.

I've never had an easier time building very complex UI functionality than with React. But it requires you to actively start reasoning about change in your code (what doesn't change), and this is something most people are not used to.

Personally I think React compiler is folly for this reason: they are taking the most interesting part of React, the part that lets you write apps that are incremental from top to bottom, and telling you it's too complicated for you to think about. Nonsense.

The issue is just that React makes pros feel like idiots unless they eat some humble pie and grok the principles and the reasons behind it. Which is that React is what you get when you try to come up with a UI architecture that can make entire classes of problems go away.

Without a VDOM, one way data flow, and diffing, your UI won't just be slow, it'll be full of secret O(n^2) cascades, random ifs to stop infinite cycles, random "let's update this state early so other code can immediately use it" ordering issues, and so on.

kitkat_new2• 2 years ago

you shouldn't project from react to vdom in general:

https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/templates-diffing

novocantico11• 2 years ago

There were two groups I was hoping vanillajsx would resonate with. The first is people who still buy into the React dream but are beginning to be disillusioned with its inability to deliver on its promises, and the second is people who already are fully disillusioned.

Specifically, I'm hoping to show that vanilla architectures can be not only performant, but easy to maintain with well designed code that uses stable and known patterns. Using JSX just so happens to clean up the code nicely and make the relationship between React and vanilla very visible, but that's really all it did here.

Although to be fair, the hack required to get JSX-as-DOM to work is really unfortunately and I'm not very happy with it, and I would prefer JSX to just render as an object tree that anyone can render however they want. But when I tried that for a few months or a year, it was not nearly as performant as rendering them as strings as soon as they're evaluated, which can then be cached via standard module caching. At least, that's how I got immaculatalibrary to entirely render all HTML files in ~700ms initially and ~70ms on most file changes.

I'll try to do some experimentation next week to see if I can get more performance back out of having <foo bar={qux}>child</foo> to render as {foo:{bar:qux, children:[child]}} again though, because that would absolutely be the ideal, and would unfork JSX in the same way Typed Annotations proposes to unfork JavaScript types.

k__• 2 years ago

Wasn't the issue mostly solved with signals?

As far as I understand, signals make it much easier to keep the DOM updates to a minimum.

darepublic2• 2 years ago

More than once I got asked on interviews why react is faster than vanilla JS and I had to tell them no, it isn't.

johnfn3• 2 years ago

The "performance angle" isn't really an angle. It gets bandied around by junior devs new to React, but it's not the primary selling point of React - in fact, it's not a selling point at all. Don't believe me? Just go to http://react.dev and look - no where on the site does it say that React is a hyper-performant library. It's not! If you need blazing performance, you're best off using something much more minimal, or even vanilla JS.

When people say that React is fast, what they mean is that React can dom-diff faster than a naive O(n) approach. It means that updating a component with a thousand nested divs won't crash out your browser, like it might if you were to write the code by hand. It doesn't mean it's an objectively high-performing framework.

What React is good at is forcing you to write code in a clear, comprehensible way. Having every engineer on your team obey F(props) = state is a strict improvement over virtually any other paradigm. (Yes, you can still make a tangle of components if you try hard enough, but the complexity of the tangle is capped significantly lower than the complexity of a tangle of JS without any framework attached.)

george_sp• 2 years ago

I've faced the same issue with multiple teams,in different business domains, some with rathe heavy UIs (canvas rendering, sophisticated graphs etc). From my experience, modern frontend frameworks seem to not have taken into account these kinds of problems. To my recollection, in all of those cases, we ended up managing state and rerenders with vanilla, rather than react or angular.

A rewrite on those occasions, I do not consider possible. Most businesses are way to deep into frameworks.

What I personally advocate is to choose frameworks with valid escape hatches, and then make sure to staff a team with JavaScript programmers rather than some-framework Andies.

In an even larger scale, I advocate for web-component based solutions. I try to stay close to vanilla as much as I can. Whether I like it or not, it's the highest value professional decision, imo.

dminik• 2 years ago

This really just isn't true. If your state updates are at the component subtree level (like react) a vdom is a good choice. But, if you make your state changes more granular, you can get away with skipping VDOM entirely and work with just* regular dom nodes. Look at Solid or Svelte. No VDOM there, just pure granular updates.

*List reconciliation still has to happen, but you don't need to pull out an entire vdom. You just have to have some mapping between list items and their resulting DOM nodes.

SkiFire133• 2 years ago

TBF while Solid and Svelte don't use a VDOM on which they perform diffing, they still ultimately create a tree parallel to the DOM which is used to track dependencies.

AltruisticGapHN3• 2 years ago

I'm having fun using lit-html with vanillajs, after I saw a tweet from Marc Grabanski suggesting he didn't use the full Lit library. Admittedly I am then not taking advantage of all the reactivity goodness, but I also really dislike the decorators syntax and 95% of the time I just don't need the reactivity after the first render.

It works great! I was amazed at how you can do so much in templates, it's pretty much everything I could do in Vue templates, though a little more verbose.

I built my own `VanillaComponent` class, which has a mount() method which calls the render() function which I define on the child class.

My VanillaComponent class looks like this:

    import { html, render } from "lit-html";
    
    abstract class VanillaComponent {
      abstract render(): ReturnType<typeof html>;
    
      private _mountPoint?: HTMLElement;
    
      mount(this: VanillaComponent, target: HTMLElement) {
        target.textContent = '';
        this._mountPoint = target;
        this._update();
      }
    
      _update() {
        let templateResult = this.render();
        let rootPart = render(templateResult, this._mountPoint!);
      }
    }

So I can write something like

    class MyComponent extends VanillaComponent {
      constructor(props: { label: string }) {
        this._props = props;
      }
      
      render() {
        return html`<button>${this._props.foo}</button>`;
      }
    }

Then I can instance like so:

    let myComponent = new MyComponent({ label: "I am a button" });
    let target = document.querySelector("#demo");
    myComponent.mount(target);

The base class stores the root node (target), so later I can do

    myComponent.update()

to re-render, taking advantage of lit-html's "diffing" logic.

However something I have not been able to solve with lit-html only, is when I compose parent and child components I have to do something like :

    class MyDialog extends VanillaComponent {
      render() {
        let childComponent ...  // another VanillaComponent previously instanced
        return html`
          <div>
            ${childComponent.render()}
          </div>

So the child component I need to explicitly call render() to get the TemplateResult for the parent template.

But this means I can not do `childComponent.update()` because I don't know the root element of child component, since I did not mount it explicitly myself.

I mean technically because of the lit-html optimizations, I can do `.update()` on myDialog (the parent component) after any child component's props changes, and it will only re-render what is necessary... but let's say my child component has like 1000 cards... it seems very wasteful and it would be ideal if I could re-render only the child.

I wonder if there is a trick to get around that with just lit-html?

mst• 2 years ago

It's always worth checking the lit built in directives list for the one you've still missed (or at least it is for me ;).

I think in this case the ref() directive - i.e. https://lit.dev/docs/templates/directives/#ref - may be what you want. If it isn't exactly, reading how it's implemented would be my first step towards building something similar that is.

croes2• 2 years ago

Svelte and SolidJs work pretty well without VDOM

kolme• 2 years ago

Nice, I love lit-html(1)!

I wanted to add my two pennies to the discussion. You are of correct that with that approach you lose the declarativeness but sometimes you don't need that, if the thing is mostly static.

I went this road many years ago for a project. The nice thing of this approach is getting rid of all the ugly DOM API but enjoying it's performance over innerHTML.

(1) I absolutely love lit-html but don't like the rest of the lit components framework. Luckily you can use it independently!

skrebbel• 2 years ago

JSX in SolidJS directly returns DOM elements much like in the top part of this post, yet it does not have these disadvantages. It's true that strictly put it's not immediate mode like React and Lit are, but the framework is designed such that there's few practical downsides to that.

PKop• 2 years ago

UI is not a pure function of state[0], "UI state" is relatively stable and does not have to be recreated constantly when data input changes.

[0] https://blog.metaobject.com/2018/12/uis-are-not-pure-functio...

you want to be able to reevaluate your templates repeatedly with new state

No you don't. It is inefficient and increases complexity. You then have to extract and keep track of state yourself where the platform/UI components could have done much of this themselves.

    Calling the same method over and over again is wasteful.

    So we don't do that.

    First, we did not start with the obviously incorrect premise that the UI is a simple "pure" function of the model. Except for games, UIs are actually very stable, more stable than the model. You have chrome, viewers, tools etc. What is a (somewhat) pure mapping from the model is the data that is displayed in the UI, but not the entire UI.

    So if we don't make the incorrect assumption that UIs are unstable (pure functions of model), then we don't have to expend additional and fragile effort to re-create that necessary stability.

lucideer• 2 years ago

If the above is what you need there's not strong reasons not to use React or similar. But for most things that will lead to an interest in "Vanilla JSX" this line of thinking is premature optimization - the advantages of vdom are extant but enormously overstated. JSX has many other advantages.

It's also not even an either-or. I've worked on a codebase that did both: React was loaded for some views & others were served with a lightweight JSX renderer.

recursive3• 2 years ago

I also made a UI library based on the idea of jsx template expressions that produce real DOM nodes. It also binds model objects to attributes, eliminating some of the imperative event handler boiler-plate. I think it's a great idea, but of course I would.

https://github.com/tomtheisen/mutraction

It lets you do stuff like this.

    const model = track({ clicks: 0});
    const app = (
        <button onclick={() => ++model.clicks }>
            { model.clicks } clicks
        </button>
    );

    document.body.append(app);

cyanydeez• 2 years ago

I just don't understand how people can configure their brains to parse html inside JavaScript

zazaulola• 2 years ago

You're not alone. Someone suggested that the W3C should convene a Community Group to discuss JSX, but the grown guys involved in writing standards immediately scrapped the idea.

1attice• 2 years ago

There's a trick to it. Kind of like one of those 'magic eye' stereograms that were popular in the nineties. You sort of unfocus and boom, there it is.

It also reminds me of that Douglas Adams line about flying: it's the trick of falling and completely missing the ground, so in order to do it, you can't think about it too hard.

xigoi2• 2 years ago

If there can be JS inside HTML, why not HTML inside JS?

flowerlad• 2 years ago

This is very similar to Vanilla TSX: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder

Here’s an app written using Vanilla TSX: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka/tree/master/webapp/Clie...

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

Just out of interest I wanted to see something a little bit similar in Web Components:

    <html lang="en">
    <body>
      <h1>Web Components Examples</h1>
      <h2>Counter Component</h2>
      <counter-component></counter-component>
      <h2>Clickable Button Component</h2>
      <clickable-button></clickable-button>
      <h2>Toggler Component</h2>
      <toggler-component></toggler-component>
      <script>
        class CounterComponent extends HTMLElement {
          constructor() {
            super();
            this.count = 0;
            this.button = document.createElement('button');
            this.button.textContent = this.count;
            this.button.addEventListener('click', () => {
              this.count++;
              this.button.textContent = this.count;
            });
            this.attachShadow({ mode: 'open' }).appendChild(this.button);
          }
        }
    
        class ClickableButton extends HTMLElement {
          constructor() {
            super();
            this.clicked = false;
            this.button = document.createElement('button');
            this.button.textContent = "Click me!";
            this.button.addEventListener('click', () => {
              this.clicked = !this.clicked;
              this.button.textContent = this.clicked ? "Clicked!" : "Click me!";
            });
            this.attachShadow({ mode: 'open' }).appendChild(this.button);
          }
        }
    
        class TogglerComponent extends HTMLElement {
          constructor() {
            super();
            this.on = false;
            this.button = document.createElement('button');
            this.button.textContent = "OFF";
            this.button.addEventListener('click', () => {
              this.on = !this.on;
              this.button.textContent = this.on ? "ON" : "OFF";
            });
            this.attachShadow({ mode: 'open' }).appendChild(this.button);
          }
        }
        customElements.define('counter-component', CounterComponent);
        customElements.define('clickable-button', ClickableButton);
        customElements.define('toggler-component', TogglerComponent);
      </script>
    </body>
    </html>

slmjkdbtl3• 2 years ago

I never understand the appeal of JSX over something like

  h("div", {}, [
    h("p", {}, "this is easy"),
    ...list.map((l) => h("li", {}, l),
  ])

With this you automatically get loops, variable interpolation etc without having to invent a compiler and new syntax. Can someone help me understand?

fredmerc2• 2 years ago

Keep going down that logical rabbit hole. You end up with Common Lisp!

erikpukinskis2• 2 years ago

You might be confusing JSX for something else. In JSX you also don’t need new syntax for loops. JSX Is JavaScript, as people like to say.

But to your point, JSX doesn’t really do much. Your h function is basically what React.creatElement does. Google “React without JSX” and you’ll see how it looks.

JSX is just syntactic sugar over React.creatElement. And that is what makes it so nice… there _are_ no special constructs for loops, or variables, or components. They are actual JavaScript loops, JavaScript variables, and JavaScript function.

It makes JSX easier to reason about than most templating languages.

sim0n• 2 years ago

I would assume that lot of people just find the JSX equivalent a lot more readable and familiar (a matter of opinion, of course.)

  <div>
    <p>this is easy</p>
    {list.map((l) => <li>{l}</li>)}
  </div>

> you automatically get loops, variable interpolation etc without having to invent a compiler and new syntax

To be fair to JSX, you use regular loops, interpolation, etc without any different syntax (`{}` accepts a vanilla JS expression), you just obviously need the compiler step to de-sugar the element tags to `createElement` calls.

slmjkdbtl3• 2 years ago

Yeah the syntax is almost identical to vanilla js, but requiring a compiler is quite cumbersome compared to the advantage it provides imo.

plonq• 2 years ago

I've wondered the same thing. I think one benefit is that it looks like HTML, which means it looks similar to what you see in the browser's DevTools, which makes it easier to compare and debug.

usrusr• 2 years ago

It also makes it easier to see what it's not: at a glance, the "p" could really be anything until you scan the context. The <p> isn't a string (that on further examination turns out to get used for marking up a paragraph), it is a paragraph demarkation (in vdom, but still).

whichdan• 2 years ago

Elm works a lot like this and it's quite nice.

dimal4• 2 years ago

Here's my perspective. I never understand how some people could look at the code you pasted and think that's just as good. But different people's brains process information differently. Your example has a lot of punctuation that's very difficult for me to parse quickly. I don't see the DOM structure that's being created unless I manually pick the syntax apart in my mind, but understanding the DOM structure at a glance is far more important to me than whether I need a compiler. For the record, I'm neurodivergent. I hope that helps.

slmjkdbtl3• 2 years ago

Yes I can understand it helps if it looks like DOM on first sight, I'm thinking more about the functional aspect where it can achieve the same thing without requiring a compiler and a new syntax (altho you can argue it's not new syntax just js + html)

65• 2 years ago

Because that code is very hard to read, especially with a complex HTML structure.

codingdave• 2 years ago

For a single file or simple app, sure, your style works fine. But when you get a few hundred components in a complex app, importing them into each other and writing them as JSX tags feels like a simple, easy to understand syntax, as least to me.

And that is what a lot of the pushback against React seems to come down to as well -- it is overkill for simple things. And it is. But different people doing different apps with different levels of complexity... all have different needs.

So it is not as simple as one having appeal over the other. They are different tools for different problems.

girvo• 2 years ago

Does the final example not work in Firefox for anyone else? It worked in Edge, but not Firefox for me

    Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Map.groupBy(...).entries().map is not a function

iammrpayments• 2 years ago

Object.groupBy doesn’t seem to be available to all browsers before march 2024: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

Imba is what anyone interested in this sort of thing should look at. I have no idea why it is not more popular. Maybe because JS devs falls for Faang marketing easily.

https://imba.io/

xigoi2• 2 years ago

Many programmers seem to be scared of anything that doesn’t have semicolons and braces.

spartanatreyu• 2 years ago

Sometimes you need to lay things out differently to help comprehensibility.

Braces and semicolons exist so you can do that.

Sometimes it's just easier to read an array that's split over multiple lines.

Sometimes it's just easier to read a statement that's split over multiple lines.

Sometimes it's just easier to read two statements sharing the same line.

If your language's restrictions is making code harder to read, then it's making your job harder than it needs to be.

EugeneOZ• 2 years ago

As often happens with minimalistic approaches, it only looks interesting on very small and very simple examples.

After “How would they handle large data?” it turns into an unreadable mess.

Communication between elements is not covered, global deps, DOM updates scheduling, content projection, and so on - you “just don't need it” in small demo examples, but you do need it in the real apps.

frabjoused• 2 years ago

It’s already solved. It works well. Just walk away.

hizanberg• 2 years ago

Anyone else used Hono with SSR JSX? [1]

Was super productive and easy to create a Cloudflare Worker Web App that’s free to host thanks to Cloudflare’s generous 100k daily worker request limit.

Generally don’t believe in serverless for larger Apps, but for small websites that you just want to create, deploy and ignore - it’s great!

https://hono.dev/docs/guides/jsx

drikerf• 2 years ago

Nice project! I do wonder though if jsx is the best way to represent elements in code?

Clojure datastructures makes this so much more enjoyable. Everything is just basic lists and maps which makes it very flexible and powerful.

[:ul [:li "task 1"] [:li "task 2"]]

It's weird that it's not more common for making web apps.

globular-toast• 2 years ago

There is a library for Python called htpy that does this.

Trouble is if you're used to HTML it can take a while to get used to it. It's like a learned helplessness or something.

edflsafoiewq2• 2 years ago

There are a lot of DOM util libraries that look like

  h("ul", h("li", "task 1"), h("li", "task 2"))

This is called "hyperscript-style" after an early library that used it. This is basically what JSX compiles to too. There used to be a lot of JSX vs hyperscript debates.

There's also variants like h.ul(h.li("task 1"), h.li("task 2")) using Proxies now too.

mg2• 2 years ago

What is the benefit of mixing js and html?

    el = <button>Click me</button> as HTMLButtonElement;

What would be the downside of

    el = html.button('<button>Click me</button>');

That way no compilation step would be needed and debugging would be easier as the code executed in the browser is the same code the developer writes.

littlestymaar7• 2 years ago

With the first example you have syntax highlighting and compile-time check.

With the second of you have stringa.

mg2• 2 years ago

Why wouldn't one be able to tell syntax highlighters and code checkers that the string that goes into the html.something() functions is html?

Joeri2• 2 years ago

If you use a html`` tagged template literal combined with the html-in-template-string vs code extension you get syntax highlighting. A simple html identity literal function is a one-liner: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

moffkalast• 2 years ago

The benefit is that it makes people puke from looking at it so you have more job security I guess. Putting xml onto the same line with a scripting language is like mixing toothpaste and orange juice.

I don't understand why people take such offense to calling document.createElement() or document.getElementById() or kind of document. or window. function. It's consistent and native.

Zecc• 2 years ago

Compare

    class Item extends EventTarget {

        #checkbox = <input type='checkbox' /> as HTMLInputElement;
        li;

        constructor(private list: List, text: string) {
            super();
            this.li = (
              <li class='item'>
                {this.#checkbox}
                <span onclick={() => this.toggle()}>{text}</span>
                <button class='close' onclick={() => this.remove()}></button>
              </li> as HTMLLIElement
            );
            this.#checkbox.onclick = () => this.toggle();
        }
    }

with

    class Item extends EventTarget {

        #checkbox;
        li;
        
        constructor(private list: List, text: string) {
            this.#checkbox = createElement('input');
            this.#checkbox.setAttribute('type', 'checkbox');
            
            this.li = document.createElement('li');
            this.li.className = 'item';
            this.li.appendChild(this.#checkbox);

            const span = document.createElement('span');
            span.onclick = (() => this.toggle());
            span.textContent = text;
            this.li.appendChild(span);

            const button = document.createElement('button');
            button.className = 'close';
            button.onclick = (() => this.remove());
            this.li.appendChild(button);
        }
    }

Of course you can create helper functions to avoid all the `createElement`s followed by `setAttribute`s. As mentioned elsewhere you can even used tagged strings. But doing things "manually" is painful.

whazor• 2 years ago

I don't see why the type casting (as HTMLButtonElement) is needed. Because document.createElement("button") returns HTMLButtonElement in TypeScript.

miika• 2 years ago

I used to explore similar stuff and prototyped something I call “Vanilla Components” but then in the end I fell in love with Web Components and quit React (and all other frameworks).

merlindru• 2 years ago

VanJS deserves a mention here! https://vanjs.org/

Another interesting thing is that other JSX libraries like Solid.JS also return DOM nodes, and I love that this idea is gaining traction

The closer we get to the platform we're using, the better. Being removed by layers of abstractions CAN be useful, but in practice, I haven't found a use for abstracting away the platform. (yet.)

Maybe huge projects like Facebook benefit from this tho (which I haven't worked on)

croes2• 2 years ago

Isn't SolidJS useless in the bundle size comparison?

novocantico11• 2 years ago

That may be a point in favor of imlib.

Technically this is the only code bundled with vanilla jsx:

https://vanillajsx.com/@imlib/jsx-browser.js

dqh• 2 years ago

Those interested in this space may find my fairly unknown project interesting: https://nakedjsx.org/

It started as a static site generator but added a bunch of support for client JavaScript too.

n3storm• 2 years ago

For me is like old PHP where HTML and controlling and data access was all around. We use to call it spaghetti code.

NaN13522• 2 years ago

How does this stack up aginst using lit-html?

NaN13522• 2 years ago

I’m having fun using vanilla js with lit-html. Using string templates instead of jsx. VSCode extensions for lit make it almost identical to editing vue templates with type checking etc

cies• 2 years ago

I frown at JSX. Just a layer of abstraction that is so "leaky" that you have to know what actually goes on in the layers below or you are fucked.

It looks simpler at first glance/ to a untrained eye; but it's just adding complexity without really solving any problems.

I like approaches like Kotlinx.html, scalatags, Elm's HTML package or HtmlFlow. They are also abstractions, but they add typesafety that html-as-a-string does not offer. On top of that you get breakpoints, code completion, and you can keep working in one language.

talkingtab• 2 years ago

A side question. The advantage of JSX I see is the ability to connect, declaratively, components. I find this very helpful in terms of understanding programs I write. I wonder if I use React not because of the virtual dom, but simply because of JSX.

So I would like to explore the ability to use JSX in non-DOM environments. react-three-fiber does this with Threejs, but then it is still React oriented. I found this article about parsing JSX https://blog.bitsrc.io/demystifying-jsx-building-your-own-js.... And I know babel has something that parses JSX.

Does anyone have recommendations for doing this. Threejs to me a good candidate - a non React version, since it is a hierarchical system (scene, meshes, materials etc), but I suspect there are other applications.

I made an attempt to implement a Javascript version of Hickey's transducers - a sort of conveyor belt of functions and that is another instance of a series of processing steps that might be best represented in JSX

erikpukinskis2• 2 years ago

I see what you’re getting at, but technically the virtual DOM is what makes JSX declarative.

JSX doesn’t actually write anything, it’s just a templating language over React.createElement.

It’s the virtual DOM that actually syncs those structures created by createElement to the real DOM. So it’s the virtual DOM that allows you to write your code declaratively.

That’s evidenced by OP’s project, which is JSX without the declarative piece. You just get an Element and then you have to update it imperatively if you want to change anything.

andruc4• 2 years ago

It's very strange that when I land on the page for the very first time, I land halfway down the page and I'm staring at a block of random code.

Not what you'd expect to see.

andruc4• 2 years ago

#real-todolist has an autofocus element and I'm using Firefox

novocantico11• 2 years ago

Oops. Fixing now.

andruc4• 2 years ago

Any comparisons on performance?

emadda2• 2 years ago

One of the reasons for JSX originally was to reduce usage of the DOM APIs, as they are slower than direct JS object manipulation. The JSX diff of prev/next allows you to minimize DOM API calls.

I would guess there is more overhead in creating a dom element than a JS object (which JSX elements compile to).

austin-cheney4• 2 years ago

React came out in 2013. At that time object manipulation would likely have been, at best, only marginally faster than writing to the DOM.

First, you have to understand that at that time Firefox was about 500x faster at accessing the DOM than Chrome and about 250,000x faster accessing the DOM via the API methods than via querySelectors. Firefox and Chrome performed about equally in use of querySelectors with Chrome being a tiny bit faster. So, the DOM was already fast, but occupied a different memory space than JS.

At any rate the original motivation had nothing to do with performance. The goal was to introduce a template system that fit with React’s state/component system. JS modules weren’t a thing yet, so code organization was very different at that time and centered around concepts like AMD and Common.js, though it was mostly some form of AMD typically require.js.

The design of the template system in Vue was created to solve for the exact same conditions according to the internal organization of Vue.

emadda2• 2 years ago

Respectfully, my experience says otherwise:

https://jsben.ch/cSWJa

- JS object appears to be at least 2x faster than document.createElement() (Chrome)

- Note: JS object only loosely represents JSX element so it is a bit unfair. But with actual JSX objects I would assume it is still somewhat faster than the DOM API.

https://youtu.be/DgVS-zXgMTk&t=1532

- Pete Hunt, one of the React devs, says "JSX is faster than the DOM because it is JS memory."

NohatCoder2• 2 years ago

For anyone who can live without <> syntax I made DOM Maker, no compilation step, no injection vulnerability footguns, just make a bunch of function calls in a tree structure, and you get DOM with the same tree structure, complete with non-string event handlers.

Mostly I just do Vanilla.js, but the vanilla DOM creation functions turn really verbose, I got tired of that and created this to cut back on code size and increase readability.

There are other libraries that do something similar, but in my own very biased opinion this is one of the better.

https://github.com/NoHatCoder/DOM_Maker

jwtorres• 2 years ago

I genuinely don't understand why anyone would be interested in using frameworks on top of JS. None of them can do anything that pure JS can't do (+libraries), they just make it less readable and less intuitive compared to the original C-like syntax of JS. JS libraries make sense, of course, but why keep messing with the syntax?

nf17• 2 years ago

Great job, is there something similar but for SwiftUI?

xwall• 2 years ago

No matter how complex your app is but still React will not break, performance on web is not a big issue as benchmarks say, even a junior developer can achieve 90%+ lighthouse score, but any senior developer may fail to ship it successfully.

ultimately go to react.dev because: "Maturing is realizing React is best"

VanillaJSX.com

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