5 ms·

None of those links say that React is faster than using no framework, just that it is fast, presumably compared to other frameworks or techniques before that di

by Osmose 3y ago

None of those links say that React is faster than using no framework, just that it is fast, presumably compared to other frameworks or techniques before that did DOM replacement. I guess you could say that not being specific was misleading but we'd have to agree to disagree on that. I _did_ work on the web a decade ago and my recollection is that it wasn't ever unclear that React's performance claims were that it was fast for a framework and not faster than equivalent manual DOM mutations.

acdha 3y ago
> I _did_ work on the web a decade ago and my recollection is that it wasn't ever unclear that React's performance claims were that it was fast for a framework and not faster than equivalent manual DOM mutations. That was a very common claim - if you search for old comments there was some very magical thinking about virtual DOMs at the time. I do agree it was worse in the fanboy circles - there’s a game of telephone where nuance is lost at every iteration so you’d sometimes have a blog post where someone said they saw a big win replacing a thicket of jQuery plugins and it’d eventually be repeated as “React is ZOMG FAST!!!!” with a few people trying in vain to suggest that replacing a bunch of organic code with something planned probably mattered more. Anyway, my point isn’t that React is terrible but more that you really want to measure & review assumptions to make sure you’re not relying on something stale. It’s still easy to find assumptions from the IE6 era shaping what people think of as fast or slow, and especially with the massive front end framework trend it’s easy for people to have enough layers that their understanding of their application’s performance is far off. Choosing React is fine, just make the trade offs deliberately.

5 ms·

None of those links say that React is faster than using no framework, just that it is fast, presumably compared to other frameworks or techniques before that di

by Osmose 3y ago

acdha 3y ago
> I _did_ work on the web a decade ago and my recollection is that it wasn't ever unclear that React's performance claims were that it was fast for a framework and not faster than equivalent manual DOM mutations. That was a very common claim - if you search for old comments there was some very magical thinking about virtual DOMs at the time. I do agree it was worse in the fanboy circles - there’s a game of telephone where nuance is lost at every iteration so you’d sometimes have a blog post where someone said they saw a big win replacing a thicket of jQuery plugins and it’d eventually be repeated as “React is ZOMG FAST!!!!” with a few people trying in vain to suggest that replacing a bunch of organic code with something planned probably mattered more. Anyway, my point isn’t that React is terrible but more that you really want to measure & review assumptions to make sure you’re not relying on something stale. It’s still easy to find assumptions from the IE6 era shaping what people think of as fast or slow, and especially with the massive front end framework trend it’s easy for people to have enough layers that their understanding of their application’s performance is far off. Choosing React is fine, just make the trade offs deliberately.