I'm so glad I'm not the only one thinking this. I built a medium-complexity, money-making, production-grade app in Next.js and started out on Vercel's hosting (and Google Firebase) and then moved to hosting myself and stripping out Firebase, replacing it with Pocketbase.
Pocketbase was the ONLY good thing about this journey. Everything else sucked just so terribly.
Infinite complexity everywhere, breaking changes CONSTANTLY, impenetrable documentation everywhere.
It is just so, so awful. If we rewound the last five years of FE trends and instead focused on teaching the stuff that existed at the time properly, we'd be in a much better position.
I've also built a very complex React frontend (few thousand users, pretty heavy visual computation required in many places). And while I don't particularly like React either, Next.js was even worse.
And lastly, built a CMS in Go, with vanilla JS. And while the DX sometimes feels lacking, I just can't help but feel that I actually know wtf is going to happen when I do something. Why is that so hard?
In React and Next.js I am STILL, AFTER SIX YEARS constantly guessing what might happen. Yes, I can fix just about anything these frameworks throw at me, thanks to all the experience I've gathered about their quirks, but it all just feels to messy and badly designed.
In Go, the last time I guessed what might happen was in the first six months of learning it. No surprises since. Codebases from years ago are still rock-solid.
Why can't we do this at the frontend, goddammit?
" Codebases from years ago are still rock-solid." This is the biggest thing for me. I recently pulled down an 8 year old hobby Java/Maven project I had and it compiled and ran perfectly on the first try. Imagine trying to get an 8 year old javascript project to work...
At my previous startup (co-founder who made all technical decisions) we were unfortunately stuck with React Native. I had Mondays that started with the project not building after some dependency changes. Imagine something failing to build 3 days after you've last touched the codebase…
Just did, I installed the version of node specified somewhere, codified it into mise, and was up and running in no time.
You mean like this?
nvm use && npm i && npm run dev
Does NPM work for you in the first place? Much less after 5 years? They’ll have gone through 2 major revisions on their lock file format, and it’ll complain you don’t have the exact version of node specified in your package.json
Oops, one of the dependencies is a C++ library that doesn't compile on your less-than-five-years old arch.
That only works if the project is constantly maintained. Otherwise it can and will break in time.
Ok, 50 packages have critical vulnerabilities now
And another 30 didn't use versioning correctly so they installed new dependencies of their own that broke things three levels deep. Yes, based on a true story.
[dead]
I think the big complex FE frameworks are going to go away. After doing work with HTMX and Alpine JS, and Ruby on Rails with Turbo + Stimulus, I am all in on this paradigm. Basic JS, or a micro front end framework is all you really need.
it might be a bit over the top but there is Cogent Core[0]; it supports apps on desktop, mobile apps, and the web. it even supports 2d and 3d. and it's all in go, backend and frontend (using WASM).
[0] https://github.com/cogentcore/core
As much as I hate Next.js as the next guy, let's please not push full canvas rendering approaches. They SUCK. Their https://www.cogentcore.org/core/ own site is slow to load, scrolling is visually painful since it render at what I assume is 60Hz and not my native much higher monitor refresh rate. They are expensive in terms of computation, wasting resources on the machine, to display text. Want to select text, better hope the developers want you to be able to select text or didn't forget to do so, case in point text inside buttons. Accessibility is also usually much weaker, screen readers often suffer and if they don't something else will.
Canvas instead of DOM -> :(
EDIT: Gave it another try and more issues appear, within seconds of using. The left side has a rendering bug where the selected areas are cut off sometimes, ctrl+zoom does not zoom the page as it does on all normal websites. I can still zoom via menu. Middle mouse open link in new tab doesn't work. Z layer bugs everywhere. I expect more the longer I'd look.
Oh my god, I thought you were exaggerating at least a little.
The “static preview” it shows while it loads (for like 10-15 seconds!) is so much smoother and nicer to scroll around than the actual thing. On mobile, every third scroll attempt actually opens the right click context menu. It’s a stuttering mess on my high refresh rate phone. Nobody should ever make websites like this.
wow this is bad! like truly bad UX. please don't recommend this.
I typed "0" into the scaling field to see how it handled it, and couldn't recover from there...
it's completely shit