Re:Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
by ricardobeat on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @04:14AM
(#30511621)
That's not completely correct. React is, and has been from the start, a UI rendering library. Its fundamentals are component abstractions, the component tree, lifecycle, the virtual DOM. We had other declarative frameworks before React (Ractive.js, svelte's spiritual grandfather, being the most popular one).
The 'inputs changed, render this' paradigm (and by this I mean reactivity, not the declarative model) has been around for much longer and is exactly what this post is about - React doesn't really do that, since it relies on you to explicitly tell it, via dependency arrays or setState calls, when to re-render. It is not fundamentally different from `.on('change', this.render)` code we were writing back in 2010, just a lot of syntax sugar on top.
That React managed to sell itself so well, while not actually delivering on the reactivity or performance promises, is the surprising part. I'm excited for the future as we finally move on from this era.
The 'inputs changed, render this' paradigm (and by this I mean reactivity, not the declarative model) has been around for much longer and is exactly what this post is about - React doesn't really do that, since it relies on you to explicitly tell it, via dependency arrays or setState calls, when to re-render. It is not fundamentally different from `.on('change', this.render)` code we were writing back in 2010, just a lot of syntax sugar on top.
That React managed to sell itself so well, while not actually delivering on the reactivity or performance promises, is the surprising part. I'm excited for the future as we finally move on from this era.