primitives VS vanilla-extract

Fast forward to a week ago, I cloned the Reach UI and Radix UI codebase and started exploring. Large codebases are always difficult to comprehend. With some digging around and reverse engineering, I was able to create the first component listed in the Reach UI docs, the Accordion.

Hi HN! I'm Vlad, a designer and engineer on the Radix team (https://radix-ui.com). We just launched Radix Themes, an open source component library for building modern, accessible React apps.

Radix Themes is built on top of Radix Primitives (https://radix-ui.com/primitives), which companies like Vercel, CodeSandbox, and Supabase, among others, already use to power their interfaces.

Our goal is to help you focus on your product and build it faster instead of re-inventing common designs and working on the UI components over and over.

Under the hood, Radix Themes is built with TypeScript, React and vanilla CSS. All design tokens are CSS variables that you can tweak, overwrite, or use to build your own custom components with any styling solution that you like.

The idea to build Radix Themes emerged while working on our own design system at WorkOS (https://workos.com), which is the company behind Radix. There was hundreds of design details and edge cases that we had to take care of, so it still didn't feel like a solved problem.

We also were obsessed with getting the developer experience right. For every component we asked ourselves—what is the right API? What are the right props and parts? What should, and more importantly, shouldn’t be a part of this component? What API would make the code easy to understand and maintain, and what would put you into a messy situation that could bite when you don’t expect it?

With this approach, we used our own, battle-tested components that serve our paying users to kickstart Radix Themes.

I hope that you find Radix Themes useful. Right now, there’s 45 components, hundreds of carefully crafted variants, a few simple and powerful primitives for layout, and an extensive token system.

I would love to hear your feedback on our work and learn about your experiences with building UIs.

Other things that led me to choose this path were: Most libraries that are ports, official or not, use the original name (e.g. Svelte Material UI); Radix UI's license is fairly permissive (https://github.com/radix-ui/primitives/blob/main/LICENSE), which is why I also don't think it matters that it's a company behind it. Same as why I don't see an issue with the name Preact, for example.

For a react project I recommend https://radix-ui.com, it's got pretty good defaults

radix-ui.com

This is really cool, Radix UI uses a similar hook internally for their components. I like your implementation though.

Remix is a dream. Once combined with Radix Form Component it'll be freaking heaven. https://github.com/radix-ui/primitives/blob/form-rfc/rfcs/2023-radix-form-primitive.md

Looks like radix-ui.com, but a bit more boring tbh

In our experience, the best testing strategy for modern frontends is a combination of E2E testing (using Playwright+NextJS), and unit testing. Visual regression testing is not worth the effort in our opinion, especially with the advent of better CSS tooling like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract.

For building component libraries I’ve been a big fan of vanilla extract. Apparently it’s from the same people who made css modules

This sounds exactly like Vanilla Extract. https://vanilla-extract.style/

KumaUI : Another relatively new contender, Kuma uses zero runtime CSS-in-JS to create headless UI components which allows a lot of flexibility. It was heavily inspired by other zero runtime CSS-in-JS solutions such as PandaCSS, Vanilla Extract, and Linaria, as well as by Styled System, ChakraUI, and Native Base. ### Vue

The components are styled with CSS modules. When building the library, these styles will get transformed to normal CSS style sheets. This means that the consuming application will not even be required to support CSS modules. (In the future I want to extend this tutorial to use vanilla-extract instead.)

I do a lot of UI work and have never understood the appeal of Tailwind. It’s like relearning a new language. Tailwind was released in 2017. Maybe the CSS landscape wasn’t as good back then? Modern CSS is pretty awesome.

I’ve enjoyed using Vanilla Extract https://vanilla-extract.style/. It’s like css-in-js with none of the downsides as everything gets compiled to css.

Nah, I used enough Tailwind to know it becomes a spaghetti mess. I stick with CSS now, and in React I use https://vanilla-extract.style, compile time CSS in TypeScript.

Vanilla Extract is my current choice for the next greenfield project. I would also recommend checking out how and why this team integrated it with Tailwind.

I'm not trying to call a particular org or library out, because I think the ones I've been digging through (and prompted me to write this) are very high quality. It's vanilla-extract (a build-time CSS-in-JS library) and Braid Design System (built on vanilla-extract).

Apart from what has been suggested, there is also https://vanilla-extract.style/.