Broadly speaking I think React is in a weird spot where they have painted themselves into a corner with no obvious way of fixing it by essentially forking the DOM and doing so many things independently of the wider web platform. That approach made a lot of sense when it was first released but is just a liability at this point.
If you’re deep in React land and it’s all you know I think 2022 might be a good time to expand your horizons a bit because the landscape around you has changed a lot in the past five years.
> Broadly speaking I think React is in a weird spot where they have painted themselves into a corner with no obvious way of fixing it by essentially forking the DOM and doing so many things independently of the wider web platform. That approach made a lot of sense when it was first released but is just a liability at this point.
The problems that strict mode is addressing with this somewhat unusual approach have absolutely nothing to do with the VDOM. Rather it is that code using React is subject to restrictions (being pure functions and following the hook rules when using hooks) that are impossible to express or enforce at compile time in javascript.
Sorry just to be clear, I wasn’t tying this to the strict mode situation but was attaching myself to the concept that this is just one of several points where the framework is showing some signs that it’s time to start thinking about alternatives particularly because I don’t think some of them are fixable at this point, they are just too central to the entire project and those decisions no longer make sense.
Outside of Vue, and maybe Angular, are there any other stable alternatives with a decent ecosystem? I'd love to hop off the React train, but I haven't found anything that compares to the experience of just using create-react-app with Typescript support.
I have been using it for a month now and love it. If you are coming from react the API is familiar enough that you can get productive in a day or two. Reliance on observables is a big plus for me (no virtual dom diffing) and the dom reconciliation is very similar to lit. Check out the author's blog posts [2] for more details.
If are into jamstack, Astro [3] has good support for solidjs already and offers an easy way for selective hydration of dynamic parts of the UI.
The component ecosystem is a bit lacking compared to react/vue, but it pairs well with pure css libraries like bulma/daisyui or webcomponent libraries like ionic/shoelace.
And you can also wrap your solid components as web components and use them in a larger app without converting it all to use solidjs.
If you haven't check out ember-cli + ember.js latest Octane release. Full typescript support, thriving community, lots of companies using it, lots of active development.
Aside from the bustling ecosystem, Surplus has been around for a long time, consistently beats benchmarks, and is quite lightweight and unopinionated. I've used it for a lot of projects, small and large, quite successfully.
If you’re deep in React land and it’s all you know I think 2022 might be a good time to expand your horizons a bit because the landscape around you has changed a lot in the past five years.