Comment by Steve Taylor on "Is modern front-end overcomplicated?"

The large number of options have come about due to the big gap between web standards and the technical requirements around using the browser as a software delivery platform. If web standards had more solutions for the technical problems that these numerous frameworks (attempt to) solve, and if these standards were widely implemented, you'd find all this framework and tool glut would fall away quite quickly.

For now, if you want to partake in front-end heavy web app development, you'll need to pick a good stack and stick with it. A lot of fronties appear to be converging on the same front-end toolchain consisting of React, Redux, React Router, Babel and Webpack.

Check out https://youtu.be/0nh2EK1xveg it's not actually that hard to just use web standards.. There is this strange prethought that the DOM is hard.

I've also written about the subject: medium.com/re-dom/master-the-dom-bc1a2a06089b

Juha Lindstedt the DOM isn't hard. But state management is very bug-prone. The value proposition of the virtual DOM is that instead of tracking state in the UI, we make the UI a pure function of non-UI application state and therefore regenerate it on every state change. It's usually very cheap to rebuild virtual DOM and diff it with the previous virtual DOM. The diff is then applied to the real DOM so it doesn't have to be rebuilt. The point of the virtual DOM has nothing to do with the real DOM being slow. It's necessary because we want to only apply diffs to the DOM as a function of diffs between our non-UI state, having the same effect as us perfectly (without bugs!) maintaining the UI state ourselves. If the DOM was thrown away and rebuilt every time application state changed, things like animations and transitions just wouldn't work in React.

I'm using pure updates with RE:DOM as well, that's a good practise! 👍

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