crank VS ava

If you enjoy this approach, you might enjoy the Crank JS framework. https://crank.js.org/

> Crank uses generator functions to define stateful components. You store state in local variables, and `yield` rather than `return` to keep it around.

I'm very interested in seeing if using the commonly implemented forms of compiler support for async programming can also be well used for GUI programming. One wishawa[0] is also perusing this approach in Rust but I first came upon this idea from the crank-js[1] authors. It wasn't clear to me why that one never went anywhere. Was it failure with the approach or was React just a good solution in the space? I can say this though, there's something strikingly elegant about those initial samples of using JavaScript generators for components.

[0]: https://github.com/wishawa/async_ui

[1]: https://github.com/bikeshaving/crank

Take a look at crank.js, a JavaScript framework where components can be written as async functions or as generators. It seems similar to what you're trying to do :)

Well there's https://crank.js.org that uses native js generators where you would you normally put hooks in. Never used it but looked like a very neat idea.

Reminds me of https://github.com/bikeshaving/crank, which was rather fun for a PoC I made a while back.

Strictly speaking, the framework hides this complexity away, but it still exists and it is the framework that's now paying the extra cost. Of course a framework is allowed, and should, when possible, hide away these things. For example Crank.js uses generators to allow for async Components as first class citizens, https://github.com/bikeshaving/crank, but they're still having to deal with the pitfalls of asynchronous work.

To give the author of https://crank.js.org/ due credit, after reading through the descriptive posts I was impressed by the amount of thought and design that went into it.

> What do you propose as an alternative?

There are lots of alternatives, but perhaps the simplest would have been to use async generators. This is how Crank[0] (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) works, and it allows you to do anything (AFAIK) that's possible with hooks with a much simpler and more testable API.

> So, sure, there are limitations and rules you have to pay attention to with hooks... but that's just programming.

No, it's not. The biggest problem with React hooks is that they are not composed of transferable knowledge, meaning memorizing these rules and patterns does not transfer outside of React; likewise, I can't use much of the knowledge I have already built up over many years of my career when using hooks. It's the same argument that's made against Rails, where you have to learn tons of Rails-specific idioms (on top of having to understand general concepts like relational database access patterns) instead of just writing code in a way that's more direct and intuitive for anyone.

My brain has limited RAM. The more things I have to keep in my head when developing against an API, the more likely I am to make a mistake. With every release of React, I seem to have to keep more and more of these details in my brain as I work. Contrast this with something like Svelte, where you really only need to fully grok about two concepts to use it effectively. I understand that this is the tradeoff the React team made, but I'm not convinced it's worth it.

[0]: https://crank.js.org/ and https://crank.js.org/blog/introducing-crank

We use Jest Framework for testing. Jest is not a dogma, and, of course, in its place can be any other test runner, such as Mocha or Ava. Let's focus on tests. I'll provide a short example because I don’t want to waste your time. You can find the full version here. It's crucial to read the comments in the code below. Let's go!

> In the popular jest test runner, each test file is executed in its own child process.

Is that confirmed?

I've been following this issue:

https://github.com/jestjs/jest/issues/6957

And what Jest actually does is still kind of muddy.

In contrast to that, other test runners like AVA have a clear description what happens when:

https://github.com/avajs/ava/blob/main/docs/01-writing-tests...

I've been looking at using japa or ava for web server testing but was curious what others were using and why.

Continued work on the test suite. Implementing AVA, with snapshotting. Making a lot of effort to have the snapshot directory structure match the test262 test directory structure by generating AVA test files.

You might want to give ava a spin:

https://github.com/avajs/ava/

It has a TAP reporter, but more importantly, as opposed to the more popular solutions, like Jest, the way it achieves parallelism is explained in the docs and won't change anytime soon, thus preventing wonky, hard to debug errors which occur when this part is abstracted away.

I switched to ava for that reason and have been very happy with it. But vitest looks nice, too. Thanks for the pointer.

Runs unit tests using AVA.

Last but not least important are ava, uvu and tape; they are a really light and fast test runners.

I've had some good experiences with Ava + Sinon. I've personally disliked Jest because it seemed to do some weird trickery in the background that prevented me from using ES modules.

Ava for a simpler environment than Jest, which I usually use. I need to check how to mock ESM with it, though.