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Ask HN: How does one build large front end apps without a framework like React?

94 points thepianodan | 2 comments | 17 Oct 25 10:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.408s | source

I had a mind-blown-moment when I learnt that Obsidian was built without any frontend JS framework. ( https://forum.obsidian.md/t/what-framework-did-the-developer-use-to-create-obsidian-desktop-application/30724/11 )

The benefits, I can see.

    JS frameworks move really quickly, and when we're working on a large, long-term project, it sucks when big breaking changes are introduced after only a couple of years. Sticking to slow-moving web standards (which are quite mature by now) increases the longevity of a project.

    And the stability also means that more time is spent on delivering features, rather than on fixing compatibility issues.

    There is also the benefit of independence. The project's success is not tied to the framework's success. And it also makes the project more secure, from supply chain attacks and such.

    Because there is no "abstraction layer" of a framework, you also have greater control over your project, and can make performance optimizations at a lower level.

    I feel not using a framework can even make us a better developer. Because we know more of what's going on.
There are benefits to using frameworks too, I'm not here to challenge that.

But this alternative of using none... it seems rarely talked about. I want to learn more about building large (preferably web-based) software projects with few dependencies.

Do you have any suggestions on how to learn more about it? Are there any open source projects you know which are built this way? It needs to be large, complex, app-like, and browser based. I'm more interested in the frontend side.

Thank you!

1. thomasikzelf ◴[17 Oct 25 12:31 UTC] No.45616000[source]▶
I build a figma clone for animation (https://moos.app). It is by no means a super large project (I think 40k loc) but is has reasonable frontend complexity. Most stuff is just composed of simple functions. For example routing is just an eventListener on hashchange. For state I am passing around an environment or firing events (the event system is 100 loc). For showing UI there is one convenience function to create HTML elements. Basically tag(tagName, props, ...children) (implementation also 100 loc). Each view is it's own file and manages itself. The object list can contain thousands of items so it uses a virtual list for performance (100 loc).

As you can see most functionality can be implemented in around 100 lines of code. The advantage is that you can build up functions just for your needs. These functions are super easy to understand because they don't have any dependencies and the whole implementation fits on one or two screens. There is very little indirection.

Another advantage is that most code is actually doing something concrete. With frameworks you often have a lot of code that is just pointing to other code, or is boiler plate code to set something up. Not having any boilerplate code also makes stepping through the debugger a lot easier.

The project has no build step in development which also makes debugging easier. It does have a build step in production.

Most people use frameworks to give the code structure. When writing vanillajs you need to bring the structure of the code yourself. This does take some getting used to but I think it is an essential skill for good programmers to have. On top of that many frameworks push you into structure that does not make much sense in my mind (for example seperating the view and the controller if those are always gonna change together).

So to conclude: My advice for building without frameworks is, just start building. Problems will come up and you can tackle those as you go. Do you think you need to use events in your application? A simple implementation is 10 lines of code and can be written in 10 minutes. If it takes me 1 hour to not use a library I will spend that 1 hour. Most frameworks will not bring that much value. Easy things become short and hard things will become impossible. I think most value is actually brought by the language and the basic api's (DOM, CSS, etc)

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2. thepianodan ◴[18 Oct 25 10:46 UTC] No.45626330[source]▶
Thank you for your perspective (and the code example on the other comment)! You make a good point about debugging, once I'm stepping into the framework, it's like uncharted territory.