Principles and priorities | Hacker News

JS-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals

Frameworks like React are often perceived as accelerators, or even as the only sensible way to do web development. There’s this notion that a more “modern” stack (read: JS-heavy, where the JS ends up running on the user’s browser) allows you to be more agile, release more often with fewer bugs, make code more maintainable, and ultimately launch better sites. In short, the claim is that this approach will offer huge improvements to developer experience, and that these DevEx benefits will trickle down to the user.

But over the years, this narrative has proven to be unrealistic, at best. In reality, for any decently sized JS-heavy project, you should expect that what you build will be slower than advertised, it will keep getting slower over time while it sees ongoing work, and it will take more effort to develop and especially to maintain than what you were led to believe, with as many bugs as any other approach.

Where it comes to performance, the important thing to note is that a JS-heavy approach (and particularly one based on React & friends) will most likely not be a good starting point; in fact, it will probably prove to be a performance minefield that you will need to keep revisiting, risking a detonation with every new commit.

699: Jeremy Keith on Web Day Out – ShopTalk

This episode of the Shop Talk Show is the dictionary definition of “rambling” but I had a lot of fun rambling with Chris and Dave!

The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

Well, this is horrifying.

Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity — Den Odell

React is no longer just a library. It’s a full ecosystem that defines how frontend developers are allowed to think.

Real talk!

Browsers now ship View Transitions, Container Queries, and smarter scheduling primitives. The platform keeps evolving at a fair pace, but most teams won’t touch these capabilities until React officially wraps them in a hook or they show up in Next.js docs.

Innovation keeps happening right across the ecosystem, but for many it only becomes “real” once React validates the approach. Which is fine, assuming you enjoy waiting for permission to use the platform you’re already building on.

Zing!

The critique isn’t that React is bad, but that treating any single framework as infrastructure creates blind spots in how we think and build. When React becomes the lens through which we see the web, we stop noticing what the platform itself can already do, and we stop reaching for native solutions because we’re waiting for the framework-approved version to show up first.

If your team’s evolution depends on a single framework’s roadmap, you are not steering your product; you are waiting for permission to move.

The only frontend stack we should talk about

Explore the platform. Challenge yourself to discover what the modern web can do natively. Pure HTML, CSS, and a bit of vanilla JS…