Will the JavaScript frameworks ever merge and become one?
The short answer from Friday’s GitNation React Summit Fireside Chat: No. The longer answer: Probably not, because it’s complicated.
While there are areas where the frameworks can and are standardizing — most frameworks other than React, for example, have adopted Signals — that’s harder to achieve when it comes to basics like how the frameworks handle syntax, said panelist Minko Gechev, the technical lead and manager for Angular DevRel at Google.
“We are probably going to unify on some shared primitives over time and shared practices,” Gechev said. “I see how we can, for example, start using Vue transitions for routes, animations — that’s going to be awesome. A lot of the frameworks are sharing Signals. We’re unifying on similar ideas about fine-grain code loading.”
“From my perspective, it’s quite possible that we’re converging, but people will probably prevent that from ever actually completely happening.”
– Ryan Carniato, creator of Solid.js
Gechev joined a fireside chat panel emceed by Daniel Afonso, a developer advocate at OLX, and composed of high-profile creators and maintainers from Solid, Next.js, Angular, Astro and Excalidraw. They spoke Friday afternoon at the React Summit in Amsterdam, which continues through this week and is being partially broadcast.
Ryan Carniato, creator of Solid, does see come convergence around high-level architectural approaches but also cited syntax as a challenge. Although he seemed more optimistic that perhaps the frameworks could converge, he was simultaneously more pessimistic that people would allow that to happen.
“You could argue that some of these could merge together, but I see people bikeshed over syntax,” he said. “Some people will never pick up JSX, some people will never give up their single file components, it does not matter to them, that in the end, if you grab maybe Vue…, Svelte 5, SolidJS — the output might be almost identical, but they all have different syntax. So from my perspective, it’s quite possible that we’re converging, but people will probably prevent that from ever actually completely happening.”
Aakansha Doshi, an open source maintainer of Excalidraw and volunteer at FOSS United Foundation, and Fred Schott, creator of Astro, participate in a fireside chat panel at React Summit 2024.
In the end, people choose frameworks for a lot of reasons, such as job requirements or sometimes a developer just “vibes” with a framework, the panel agreed.
“Was it Rich Harris [Editor’s Note: Harris is the creator of Svelte] who said people choose frameworks based on their vibe?” Carniato said. “I don’t know whether that’s a good or a bad thing. I’m not as positive about it, but I actually agree with him almost wholeheartedly. So as long as there [are] different vibes, you’re going to have different frameworks.”
(Fun Editor’s note: The New Stack was unable to hunt down that quote from Harris, but we did find that Harris wrote in Svelte’s GitHub that his framework will “optimise for vibes” and “we explicitly aim to be the framework with the best vibes.”)
Fred Schott, the co-creator of Astro, agreed with the idea that each framework offers its own “vibe,” but he saw that as code for “strengths.”
“I love that vibe comment because I feel like it is actually a reaction to the fact that none of us will ever take a stance on what our thing is good at,” he said. “If you go to Svelte’s website, it’s like the ‘synthetic cybernetic’ … it’s like that’s not why you use Svelte. [You use Svelte] because it’s really good at data visualization. It’s really a nice — like HTML — familiar syntax. It’s great for learning. It’s really powerful.”
React is really good for standard JSX and is a safe bet, he continued. Solid is super performant and leading the way, he added.
“I think it’s good that everyone has a focus and a vibe, a thing you do well, like Astro’s content focus,” he said. “If we all went down to like the lowest common denominator of some one tool to rule them all, I think we would lose out. Not every use case is the same; not every technology should be the same. I think it’s good that different frameworks or different libraries all do things better or worse or different, and have different focuses.”
Aakansha Doshi, an open source maintainer of Excalidraw, Mermaid-to-Excalidraw, react-tags and other libraries, as well as an organizer with FOSS (free and open-source software ) United Foundation Bangalore, proposed that a standards-based approach would be more useful than convergence of the frameworks. Merging could lead to maintenance issues and problems with pushing out new features between teams, she argued.
“Instead of focusing on merging the frameworks, it should be more about standardizing the principles used behind those frameworks, because then probably it can be possible in the future that in the same application, some part could be Next.js, some part could be in Astro, and part would be in some other framework. So you get the best of all the three, depending on the usage,” Doshi said. “Let’s try to standardize the principles behind building those frameworks instead of merging those frameworks.”
Editor’s Note: This pieces has been updated on July 2 with additional details about Doshi’s projects, as well as a correction to indicate she is an organizer with FOSS United Foundation Bangalore.
