react-codemod VS Mithril.js

You can convert the “easy” render-only class components to function components using the pure-component codemod.

Developer Experience - There are a number of tools that improves the development experience with React. React Developer Tools is a browser extension that allows you to inspect your component, view and manipulate its props and state. Hot reloading with webpack allows you to view changes to your code in your browser, without you having to refresh the browser. Front end development involves a lot of tweaking code, saving and then refreshing the browser. Hot reloading helps you by eliminating the last step. When there are library updates, Facebook provides codemod scripts to help you migrate your code to the new APIs. This makes the upgrading process relatively pain-free. Kudos to the Facebook team for their dedication in making the development experience with React great.

Like most popular libraries, e.g. React, Next.js and more, which provide codemods to help move their huge user base across versions, we needed a bespoke and fairly simple CLI wrapper of jscodeshift, that would provide a means of publishing, downloading and running codemods. So we created a custom 'codemod-cli', our first piece of internal codemod infrastructure.

If you'd like to migrate them, the React team maintains some awesome codemods:

https://github.com/reactjs/react-codemod

Codemods - providing automated tooling to change old patterns to new ones can go a long way in helping drive adoption of the new version. The most notable example of doing this is react-codemod (many other examples exist)

Sometimes you need to migrate from one version of a library to another, for example, when React has updated to version 15.5 the PropTypes has moved to different package and the react-developers provides codemod for migration.

Can you point me towards examples of the usage of AST rewriting tools that are actively being used by open-source library maintainers in other ecosystems to help their consumers do upgrades in large code-bases (e.g. I can see that `clang` has AST tooling, but I don't see examples online of this being widely used: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/exploring-clang-tooli...).

Within the JavaScript ecosystem this is quite popular (1. https://github.com/reactjs/react-codemod; 2. https://github.com/mui-org/material-ui/tree/HEAD/packages/ma... 3. https://github.com/emotion-js/emotion/tree/main/packages/esl... etc.) Teams that maintain huge codebases have tooling to safely automate their upgrades and the best library maintainers provide their consumers with these AST transformations.

  > Don't tell that to anyone who uses

Agree. I know js has a similar tool, jscodeshift. https://github.com/reactjs/react-codemod and https://github.com/cpojer/js-codemod/tree/master/transforms have some ideas for js.

I don’t enjoy React much, but (as I’ve commented before) I do love Mithril (https://mithril.js.org). Immediate-mode UI via a vDOM, like React, but small, simple, and with none of the reactivity complications. I’d never go back to building apps with pure JS.

You can find more information about Mithril.js on its official website.

The idea of nested function calls to build HTML is not new. Back in the hey-day of JS frameworks, this was a common vdom pattern. I kinda miss [MithrilJS](https://mithril.js.org/#dom-elements)

I have mixed feelings about React. I like it better than jQuery, and better than other JS frameworks I’ve used.

But I much prefer Mithril (https://mithril.js.org/), which offers the same immediate-mode advantages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19746235) but without the crazy complex dependency-tracking reactivity.

I rather liked this comment on React: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38640051

Vue with Vite (the builder/runner) is a stable, open source option. It is really a lightweight start where you're mostly writing HTML with interpolated data, and Vue is updating values correctly and performantly. Just build your reactive HTML app in one file and break into separate components as you're feeling the spirit. https://vuejs.org/guide/quick-start

Mithril if you just want to drop in want a tiny, complete reactive library that doesn't require a build step--this one is most like what you might end up creating in a large jQuery app. You can understand everything from the homepage. https://mithril.js.org/

HTMX if you really like HTML conventions. This doesn't feel jQuery-like and depends on your approach to your server app. https://htmx.org/

React is still has gratuitous complexity. If you need some React like, take a look at mithril which is simpler and much smaller.

The submitter creating multiple var -> let PRs (one PR per file), was also doing this in other projects, and would've broken some of their users.

https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js/pull/2880#pullreques...

And he created multiple PRs there too. And didn't follow their workflow...