Not so sure about that. You can easily write horrible code in React: Too complex, inefficient, and/or resource-intensive.
If you don’t know the tools and have good theoretical programming knowledge, all code will be spaghetti code in the long run.
I'm no fan of React, but these aren’t equivalent. If you follow the rules, react (or any of its alternatives) will manage stateful changes like adding and removing components and event listeners. JQuery is more similar to doing manual memory management in C. It’s extremely easy to get it wrong and introduce leaks and other non-local errors.
Re:The Future of Htmx
by bdougherty on Monday January 06, 2025 @04:40PM
(#42616219)
React is also extremely easy to get it wrong.
Can you give an example? I mean I know you can shoot yourself in the foot with any UI framework, but jQuery has no way of managing state, everything just leaks by default. Unless they’ve added something.
Re:The Future of Htmx
by The_Colonel on Monday January 06, 2025 @03:17PM
(#42615179)
I don't disagree, but this is not relevant for the vanilla JS vs. jQuery discussion, since vanilla JS has exactly the same problems you mention as jQuery.
But if you're working on bigger projects: It is possible, but have have to be very principled in how you use it, otherwise you're going to end up with either a massive spaghetti codebase and lots of edge cases in your app that breaks.
Alternatives like React and Rust may add more complexity upfront, but the improved structure and safety it gives has big benefits in all but the smallest projects.